Brian Barder's website and Ephems bloghttp://www.barder.com
Brian Barder's website and blogSun, 22 Feb 2015 18:36:55 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.1.1Why Labour should be talking now to the SNP, LibDems, etc., in spite of everythinghttp://www.barder.com/4406
http://www.barder.com/4406#commentsSun, 22 Feb 2015 18:36:55 +0000http://www.barder.com/?p=4406Labour could come second to the Conservatives at the elections in May in another hung parliament and still be able to form the government. That sounds impossible: but it could happen.

People, especially LibDems, assume that whichever party wins the most seats, even if short of an overall majority, automatically has the right to form a government. But the key test is not having the most seats (still less having won the most votes): it’s who is likeliest to be able to form a government that has the confidence of a majority in the House of Commons.

So here’s a possible and not improbable scenario. The election produces a hung parliament: i.e. no single party has an overall majority.. The Tories win a few more seats than Labour and claim that this entitles David Cameron to remain in No. 10 Downing Street and the Conservatives to form a new government, alone or in another coalition. However even with the support of UKIP, some LibDems, and some Northern Ireland MPs, the Tories might still be unsure of a majority. Labour, by contrast, could probably claim a clear majority in parliament if it has even qualified, conditional support from all the left-of-centre parties: the SNP, most LibDems, Plaid Cymru, the Greens and some from Northern Ireland. If he can demonstrate this, Ed Miliband is entitled to be invited to form a government and submit it to the House of Commons for approval in a vote of confidence.

The key issue therefore may be whether immediately after the votes have been counted Miliband can demonstrate, citing evidence, that he can form a government that will command the confidence of the House. But this will be almost impossible if Labour has done nothing to establish the intentions of the progressive parties before the election. If the positions of the progressives are still unclear after polling day, it will surely be too late for Labour to demonstrate its ability to muster majority support for a minority Labour government — especially if it has won fewer seats than the Conservatives. The consequence will then be five more harsh years of Tory misrule, with continuing LibDem and now UKIP support.

The alternative, however unpalatable to many good Labour people, is for Labour now to talk informally to the other progressive parties (including especially the SNP and the left-leaning LibDems) with a view to agreeing a list of specific measures that a Labour government (whether a majority or a minority government) would introduce and that the other progressive parties would support. The objective would be a loose understanding (well short of a coalition) that if a Labour government presented, both before and after the election, a broadly and partially agreed programme for government, the other progressives would agree to support it in votes of confidence and in budget votes (“confidence and supply”) to enable Labour to govern, even though some of them would be unable to promise support for other measures in Labour’s manifesto.

The usual objections to this scenario are (1) that it would seem defeatist for Labour to assume that it will fail to win an overall majority, (2) that it would encourage floating voters to vote for the SNP and other smaller progressive parties rather than for Labour, and (3) that the price for such support which the SNP would demand — scrapping Trident, exorbitant further devolution of powers to Scotland, etc. — would be too extreme for Labour to pay it. None of these objections holds water. Even if Labour does win an overall majority, it’s likely to be a dangerously slim one, and the conditional support of the other progressive parties will still be almost essential: certainly valuable. As Andrew Rawnsley convincingly demonstrates in today’s Observer, every vote for the SNP at Labour’s expense risks depriving Labour of enough seats to be able to claim the right to form a government in a hung parliament: every SNP seat won from Labour makes continued Tory or Tory-led government more likely, and a minority Labour government with SNP support more unattainable, something to be rammed home on every opportunity. As for the SNP’s likely price for its support, Labour can safely reject unreasonable or politically unacceptable demands, since the SNP will have nowhere else to go. If it withholds support from a minority Labour government and thereby brings it down, the likeliest consequence will be a further term of Tory-led government — for which the SNP will be held responsible. (Even if, as Rawnsley implausibly suggests, this is what the SNP leadership secretly wants, because it would bring Scottish independence nearer, it’s hardly what the SNP rank and file want or would tolerate.)

So Labour should talk now to the other progressives with the aim of identifying enough common ground for them to promise qualified support to a Labour government after 7 May — whether Labour has an outright majority in the House of Commons, or whether Labour has the most seats but not a majority, or even if the Tories have won marginally more seats than Labour. It’s a no brainer.

Brian

]]>http://www.barder.com/4406/feed1Future of the United Kingdom: the case for a federationhttp://www.barder.com/4401
http://www.barder.com/4401#commentsTue, 10 Feb 2015 17:41:28 +0000http://www.barder.com/?p=4401My letter summarising the case for a federation of the four nations of the United Kingdom is published in today’s Guardian (10 February 2015):

Politicians must be bold on UK federalism
In your editorial of 4 February you once again edge gingerly towards advocacy of a federal UK. Next day David Davis (Letters, 5 February) equally cautiously tiptoes towards the same solution. The Liberal Democrats favour federation but seem too timid to spell out its advantages or to answer misguided objections to it.
England’s preponderant size is a reason for the safeguards for the smaller nations provided by a federal system, not an objection to federalism; and federalism would reduce the number of professional politicians around the UK, not increase it, even with the new English parliament and government which would eventually be an indispensable feature. It offers the only satisfactory answer to Tam Dalyell’s West Lothian question; ends the gross over-centralism that still disfigures our present constitutional arrangements; permits and encourages further devolution within each of the four nations; brings government decisions closer to the people they affect; and works fine in many comparable western democracies from whom we can and should learn.
It would sharply reduce the scope and powers of the Westminster (federal) parliament and government, which may be why it’s so fiercely resisted by machine politicians. Everyone else would benefit. Labour, the party that started the still unfinished devolution process, should adopt it as a very long-term aim and promise to start the long process of consultation and research required to precede it.
Brian Barder
London

In the online version, my letter is illustrated by a photograph of the Westminster Parliament building (the Palace of Westminster) with the caption: “Anachronistic? The Houses of Parliament, London”. But nothing in my letter suggests that the Westminster parliament, or the government that it generates, is anachronistic. On the contrary: that parliament is already in effect a federal parliament elected from the whole of the UK with responsibility for all matters, throughout the UK, that have not been devolved to the parliaments and governments of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The anomalies and contradictions that bedevil the present constitution stem from the Westminster parliament’s second and incompatible role, as a parliament for England, responsible for all subjects, since there is still no separate parliament for England to which any subjects at all can be devolved. The cure for this is obvious: sooner or later (probably later) we shall inevitably establish a parliament and government for England, probably based in the midlands or north of England, to which all domestic subjects applying only to England will be devolved. This will complete the devolution process by establishing a federal relationship between the UK’s four nations.

Another letter in today’s Guardian also persuasively argues the federal case but then concludes with the suggestion that the house of commons might become the parliament for England while the Upper House, now the house of lords, would be converted into an all-UK parliament. But this would needlessly complicate the completion of the federal project, as well as perpetuating the current confusion between the Westminster parliament as an all-UK federal legislature and the same parliament as a parliament for England. The basic federal principle will never be understood and accepted in this country as long as people, especially English people, continue to regard the Westminster parliament, and especially the house of commons, as somehow belonging to England — a misconception apparently vindicated by the current fatuous proposal by the Conservative party to create a kind of fake English parliament comprising all the English MPs at Westminster, with MPs elected from the other three nations excluded. How such a pale shadow of a parliament could possibly function without a corresponding English government drawn from its members, and completely separate from the existing federal UK government, is a question that seems not to have occurred to the advocates of this hopeless scheme.

Federation will come, because it’s the logical culmination of the unfinished business of devolution and because it’s the only way to protect the three smaller nations from the domination of their Big Brother, England — a domination which still threatens to cause the disintegration of our increasingly Disunited Kingdom, unless we set a clear course to eventual federation in the nick of time.

Brian

]]>http://www.barder.com/4401/feed0Jottings for Januaryhttp://www.barder.com/4383
http://www.barder.com/4383#commentsThu, 15 Jan 2015 18:09:51 +0000http://www.barder.com/?p=4383The political and economic scenes in Britain are warming up nicely as the general election, due on 6 May, approaches. The leaders of both the main parties are working hard to establish the issue which they hope will determine how the electorate will vote. Labour focuses on the National Health Service, on which it is more generally trusted than the Conservatives. The Tories are busy fostering the false smear that Labour government spending caused the 2008 global financial crash and that if returned to office in May, Labour would wreck the economy again. In fact much the biggest issue at stake in the election is Britain’s future in the European Union, on which David Cameron is increasingly non-committal, having recklessly capitulated to the demands of his own back-bench Neanderthals and UKIP for an ‘in/out’ referendum, i.e. on whether Britain should remain in the EU or withdraw from it — ‘Brexit’, in the jargon, short for British exit. Almost all the literate political and economic pundits and most of the British financial and business communities acknowledge that Brexit would be a catastrophe for the UK in just about every sphere. Yet it looks increasingly as if in a Brexit referendum, promised by Cameron for 2017 if the Tories have an absolute majority in the house of commons after the May election, there might well be a majority for leaving the EU. Labour is unambiguously against a referendum and in favour of staying in the EU and working for its reform, with the UK’s European allies, from within. On any measurement the huge importance for Britain’s future of its relationship with the rest of Europe makes this issue eclipse all the other election issues put together. There are plenty of other reasons for wanting to replace Mr Cameron with Mr Miliband in No. 10 Downing Street, but the EU issue on its own should be enough to convince all thinking people, whatever their normal party allegiances, that a vote for the Conservatives (or UKIP), and thus for a serious risk of Brexit, would be deeply irresponsible.

* * * * *

When the London Jubilee Line tube train pulls in to Green Park station on Piccadilly, next to the Ritz hotel, the electronic notice boards in each carriage flash up the announcement that “this is Green Park: alight here for Buckingham Palace,” advice that is then repeated over the train’s loudspeaker system. Apart from making one wonder how many foreign visitors to London know what the obsolete word ‘alight’ means, this splendid rubric conjures up an image of the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh, slumbering peacefully side by side on the tube, suddenly being woken up by the announcement about Green Park and Buckingham Palace. “Come on, dear,” says the Duke, nudging the Queen: “this is our stop.” And they gather up their Sainsbury’s shopping bags and umbrellas and woolly hats, hastily hopping down onto the platform just before the doors close and the train rattles off towards Bond Street.

* * * * *

Why has Britain’s recovery from the recession been so slow and uncertain? Why are the limited fruits of the recovery, such as it is, so unfairly distributed between the richest and the poorest? Why have the Chancellor’s sadistic cuts in government spending so signally failed to bring down the budget deficit to the level that he had promised? Why is government borrowing so stubbornly resistant to the reductions promised by Osborne and Cameron? The answer to all these questions is available almost daily in the columns of the Financial Times, hardly a hotbed of socialist dogma, and in countless articles by the financial commentators elsewhere in the serious media. Capitalism is like riding a bicycle: it has to keep moving ahead and growing if it is not to collapse in a heap. Constant growth depends on constant consumer demand, reflected in economic activity by households, firms and government — especially by ordinary individual consumers. But for years the richest few in society — the bankers and financiers, the oligarchs, the shareholders, the company senior executives with their astronomical salaries and bonuses — have been seizing an ever increasing share of the national income, including an increasing share of its annual growth (if any), leaving a shrinking share for everyone else. A shrinking share for ordinary consumers means a steady reduction in their ability to consume: ever lower wages mean reduced spending, even when bolstered by increasingly expensive debts, themselves eventually a source of instability. As the prospects for a steady growth in spending fade, firms are increasingly reluctant to invest in new or up-dated plant or to recruit more labour, lacking confidence that ordinary consumers will be able to afford to buy their products. Lack of aggregate demand in the economy thus lies at the root of our failing economies, especially in the drowning eurozone but in Britain too.

There are various obvious remedies: put more money in the hands of those who can be relied on to spend every additional penny they receive, namely the poorest and weakest in society, e.g. by increasing welfare benefits and reducing taxes such as VAT which are a disproportionate burden on the poor and which reduce their ability to consume; use fiscal policy to reduce inequality in society, increasing taxes on those with the lowest propensity to spend marginal income (namely the already rich); greatly increase government spending on capital infrastructure projects, especially social housing (Roosevelt’s New Deal with its huge infrastructure projects was a vital ingredient in America’s recovery from the great depression of the 1920s and 1930s); encourage immigration by people of working age whose contributions to the economy will help to pay the pensions of Britain’s steadily ageing population and whose taxes will increase government revenue and so reduce the deficit; and pour money into education and training, research and development, vital investments for the future. It defies belief that on every single count the Conservative-led coalition has done the precise opposite of what’s plainly needed since it came into office in 2010, choking off the incipient recovery instigated by Gordon Brown’s Labour government and actually throttling aggregate demand in the economy by cutting public expenditure, increasing taxes on the poorest and cutting, instead of increasing, welfare benefits, thus shifting resources even further from the poorest to the richest. No wonder Mr Osborne has failed so miserably to hit any of his targets. Yet the Tories boast of their superior economic management skills and their success in bringing about Britain’s miracle (but mostly invisible) recovery. How do they get away with it?

* * * * *

It’s strange that the scribbling classes (to which I suppose I belong, part-time) have such a problem with “whom”. Any parenthetical phrase coming between a “who” and the verb that “who” clearly governs is automatically taken to require “who” to be converted to “whom”: “This is a man whom many believe is the greatest living poet,” where no-one would dream of writing “whom is the greatest living poet”. Examples in almost any posh newspaper or magazine are numerous. Even the aristocratic Debretts is not immune, throwing in an inappropriate semi-colon for bad measure:

But I have to confess (or as the more self-consciously trendy scribes write these days, “fess up”) to an incurable blind spot when it comes to the difference between “which” and “that” at the beginning of a relative clause. My strict grammarian daughter, founder-owner of the wildly successful linguistic blog ‘Glossophilia“, has frequently explained the difference to me, and flinches every time I get it wrong, but five minutes after receiving her instructions in the matter I have forgotten the rules all over again.

* * * * *

Two welcome developments over my book, What Diplomats Do, published last July — neither another diplomatic memoir, nor an academic textbook, nor a novel, but with elements of all three. First, the (American) publishers, Rowman & Littlefield, have agreed to extend to the end of July 2015 the deadline for individual, non-institutional UK and other non-American buyers of the book to get it for a discount (it had been due to expire at the end of 2014) if they use the revised order form on this website — simply download http://www.barder.com/wp-content/uploads/Flyer-What-Diplomats-Do-June14.pdf. (They have also increased the discount to 30%, hardback version only.) The 30% discount for American buyers (pdf) is also still available for several more months. Secondly, there have recently been two more especially perceptive and illuminating reviews of What Diplomats Do. The first, by Dr Katharina Höne, of DiploFoundation and University of Aberystwyth, is published on the DiploFoundation website and reproduced in full along with many other reviews at http://www.barder.com/wdd/reviews-of-what-diplomats-do; and the second, by the distinguished former US diplomat Marshall P. Adair, published in the US Foreign Service Journal, can be read here (pdf). Both these reviews, among others, are well worth reading, especially if you haven’t yet decided whether to buy the book!

* * * * *

One of the film’s “chapters” includes spoken extracts of notes on film by the Russian director Sergei Eisenstein. Another shows a silent dance, conceived by Mr Campbell and performed by Michael Clark Company, inspired by equations in the first volume of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital. [Financial Times, 2 December 2014]

Inspired by what?

Brian

]]>http://www.barder.com/4383/feed13Another hung parliament in May? Some myths and a remedyhttp://www.barder.com/4361
http://www.barder.com/4361#commentsFri, 19 Dec 2014 23:46:30 +0000http://www.barder.com/?p=4361The poll figures currently suggest that the general election in May will produce another hung parliament, with neither major party likely to win an overall majority of the seats. The commentariat continues to write and speak as if this must mean another coalition government, right? No, wrong. Or at any rate that the party with the most seats has the right to have the first shot at forming a government, OK? No, wrong again. Well, it’s bound to mean that if the LibDems hold the balance of power again (i.e. if they win enough seats to put either Labour or the Conservatives over the top), they will try to negotiate the terms on which they would join either in a coalition, starting with whichever of them has won more seats? Not necessarily — not even probably. OK: but it might not matter that much: the Tories are already trying to raise even more money from their hedge fund manager friends to enable them to fight a second election later in 2015, which Cameron would be entitled to call if he emerges as prime minister in May, wouldn’t he? Again, not necessarily.

There was a significant but almost wholly unnoticed constitutional amendment sneaked onto the books shortly before the 2010 election, mainly by the then Cabinet Secretary, Sir (now Lord) Gus O’Donnell. Just one month before that election, I wrote a blog post in which I described, with links to the sources, a constitutional development with major implications in the event of a hung parliament in the following month:

There is a fear that such uncertainty [caused by the failure of either party to win an overall majority], if it lasts more than a very few days, will cause a run on sterling, turmoil in the bond markets and a possible need to raise interest rates, which would slow down and perhaps reverse Britain’s economic recovery. To avert this potentially damaging fall-out from a hung parliament, the Cabinet Secretary, encouraged by the prime minister (and possibly with the agreement of the other party leaders), has written a new “rule book” — although No. 10 Downing Street has demurred at this description, asserting that it’s no more than a codification of existing and hitherto unwritten constitutional practice. The Cabinet Secretary’s code, apparently taking the form of a new chapter for the Civil Service Manual, provides, among other things, that if a hung parliament results from an election, the incumbent prime minister, regardless of the number of votes or seats his party has won, should not and must not resign as prime minister until it’s clear that there is a specific alternative MP likely to be able to form a government that will win the support of a majority of members of the House of Commons, expressed in majority support for that government’s programme, as defined in the Queen’s Speech. This formulation is designed to protect two fundamental constitutional principles: the nation’s government must be able to be carried on without a significant hiatus; and the monarch must not be placed in a position of being forced to make a decision (such as having to choose whom to invite to try to form a government when there is no consensus on whom she or he should choose) that would entail, or seem to entail, political partisanship as between the parties, thus potentially damaging confidence in the monarchy’s position above party politics.

This (probably new) rule has important implications. Newspaper editorials claiming that Brown will be morally and politically obliged to resign immediately as prime minister if Labour comes second or third in terms of votes cast, have got it wrong. Brown and the Labour government would be obliged to continue in office for as long as there was any uncertainty about how the LibDems would vote on a Labour or Conservative government’s Queen’s Speech or on a vote of confidence in either government.

What’s more, the dilemma facing Nick Clegg will not be which of Labour or the Conservatives to ‘support’ in a hung parliament, but whether deliberately to bring down the existing Labour government in the vote on the Queen’s Speech or in a vote of confidence in the government.

As we all now know, my prediction turned out to be wrong on at least two counts: Gordon Brown, lambasted by the media for his failure to resign the day after the election as soon as it became clear that the Tories had won more seats than Labour, resisted pressure from the LibDems and the Tories to hang on as prime minister until the terms of a Tory-LibDem coalition under Cameron had been agreed, got fed up with being vilified for “clinging to office”, drove to the Palace, and resigned anyway, taking the rest of his administration with him (not physically, of course); and it became clear that whatever the state of the parties’ negotiations in the effort to glue together a coalition commanding a Commons majority, there could be no question of the LibDems being willing to serve in or even support a government under Gordon Brown as prime minister, so low was his standing in the country at the time. His resignation was thus inevitable, whatever the new O’Donnell rules might say about the incumbent prime minister having a duty to remain in office until a clear successor with majority support in parliament had emerged.

The situation next May will however be different. The biggest difference is that in 2010 the incumbent prime minister was Labour, whereas in May 2015 the Tory leader will have the huge advantage of incumbency — an advantage which Gordon Brown was unable to exploit because of his unpopularity. Regardless of which party wins the most seats in a hung parliament, and even if Labour with support from the LibDems, SNP, Greens and some leftish nationalist MPs win enough seats to constitute a majority, David Cameron will still be entitled to remain in office, even until the new parliament meets. At that point Cameron would be entitled to present a programme for government in the Queen’s Speech and seek approval for it in the House of Commons (which would in effect constitute a vote of confidence in his government). If the Tories plus UKIP and some LibDems (if any) plus the right-of-centre nationalists managed to muster a majority in favour of the Queen’s (i.e. Cameron’s) Speech, Cameron could constitutionally continue as prime minister: the question of his resignation would not arise, and the Queen would have no power to demand it, even if she (and her advisers) thought that Miliband had a better chance of forming a government likely to command a more durable majority’s support in the House.

This scenario is by no means far-fetched: Cameron, ever the opportunist unhampered by principles or political philosophy, is quite capable of putting together a programme in the Queen’s Speech so alluring, so full of populist goodies, that it would be difficult for any reasonable centrist party to vote it down. In that case Cameron would almost certainly reject any idea of another coalition, heading a minority government, possibly with an informal “confidence and supply” understanding with UKIP and the other right-of-centre parties under which he would need to try to assemble a majority for each individual measure but would resign as prime minister only if defeated in a vote of confidence or on an issue involving the vote of funds to the government.

Even if events turned out in this way, or something like it, the time might well come when Cameron might calculate that if there were to be another election within a few months, the Tories would stand a good chance of winning it, this time with an overall majority. He would then be tempted to resign and hope to win an ensuing general election outright (the dubiously constitutional Fixed Term Parliament Act 2011 could easily be circumvented or if necessary repealed). Hence the reported decision of the Tories to start now collecting money to fight a possible second election in 2015. But this depends on a questionable assumption. David Cameron could resign and — if asked, but only if asked — advise the Queen to dissolve parliament, followed by a fresh election; but this is one of the few occasions when the Queen is not bound to accept her prime minister’s advice. She might well reject it if, for example, soundings by her advisers suggested that Ed Miliband would have enough backing from other parties to form a government with majority support in the House of Commons — and if she thought that the expense of another election so soon after the last would not be justified, especially in view of the risk that the outcome would be similar to that in May. In such circumstances even a prime minister in office can’t be sure that his resignation would necessarily precipitate another general election.

All this is of course pure speculation. It could well be falsified by any number of unpredictable factors, including the party arithmetic of the May election results and the extent of Cameron’s willingness to tough it out and hang on in No. 10 Downing Street until parliament meets even if Labour has won more seats than the Tories and would be generally regarded as having ‘won’ it. Or indeed Labour might win an overall majority, in which case Cameron would automatically resign and Miliband would accept the Queen’s commission to form a government. An overall Tory majority would similarly make speculation about the implications of a hung parliament redundant.

However, at the time of writing, the opinion polls seem to point to a hung parliament with Labour as the biggest party: and with less than five months left before the election, Labour clearly ought to be making contingency plans for that outcome.

So what could the Labour party do now to minimise the danger of Cameron winning fewer seats but contriving to continue as prime minister until he can stitch together a majority in support of a Tory programme in the Queen’s Speech? The first priority must be to begin now to put together an agreement with the LibDems, the SNP, the Greens and Plaid Cymru on the essential points of a minority (or indeed majority) Labour government programme for which they would all be prepared to pledge support, whatever the arithmetic of the new parliament. All this needs to be done urgently and above all publicly, so that the electorate knows what it will be voting for. It should not be difficult to find enough common ground for a programme manifestly more fair and humane than anything currently on offer from the Tories, while still being economically and fiscally responsible. For almost all concerned apart from UKIP the prize — an end to the Tory project of destruction of the welfare state and Britain’s departure from the EU — should be too great to turn down. Such a widely supported progressive Labour programme, publicly endorsed in advance by the majority of the parties likely to win seats at the election, would maximise the chances of a clear overall majority in the new parliament — and offer the best hope of preventing the Tories plus UKIP being able to assemble a counter-majority, with some support from the dithering centre. It will go against the grain and instincts of many good Labour people to begin now to look publicly for common ground with either the LibDems or the SNP, both of whom have so recently been sworn enemies of Labour. But if we are to have any hope at all of a Labour government next May, we need to swallow our pride and our prejudices and seek support for a progressive alternative to Cameron and Osborne wherever we can find it.

To be absolutely clear, I am emphatically not advocating a Labour-led government coalition with the LibDems or anyone else. If the new parliament comprises a medley of small parties, several of which would need to support any government measure in a kaleidoscope of different combinations for it to secure parliamentary approval, a laboriously negotiated coalition agreement between four or five different parties would be unachievable, as well as unmanageable and therefore undesirable. Failing an overall Labour majority (clearly the best outcome of all), the aim should be a minority Labour government with enough broad support from the other progressive parties to ensure parliamentary approval for the key elements of the Labour election manifesto to justify an informal confidence and supply understanding. For once Tina has proved her case. There Is No Alternative. But time is already dangerously short. To quote another former and very different Conservative prime minister, Action this day!

Brian

]]>http://www.barder.com/4361/feed6Three new reviews of ‘What Diplomats Do': read them herehttp://www.barder.com/4355
http://www.barder.com/4355#commentsSun, 14 Dec 2014 18:47:56 +0000http://www.barder.com/?p=4355With apologies for returning once more to the subject of my recent (first and last) book, What Diplomats Do, I want to let you know that three new reviews of the book have been published recently: on the DiploFoundation’s website, by Dr Katharina Hone; on the website of LabourList, by Sir Keith Morris, retired British diplomat and former British ambassador to Colombia; and in the journal of the Foreign & Commonwealth Association, Password, by Sir Alexander Downer, Australian High Commissioner to the UK and a former long-serving Australian Foreign Minister. All three of these reviews have now been added to the earlier reviews on my website at http://www.barder.com/wdd/reviews-of-what-diplomats-do. These reviews, especially the one by Dr Hone, provide very good descriptions of what the book sets out to do and how it does it, as well as offering judgements on how well (or badly) What Diplomats Do lives up to its title. It is not a diplomatic memoir, not a text-book, and certainly not a novel, although as several reviewers point out, it has elements of all three.

The 20% discount on the list price of the book for individual (but not institutional) buyers in the UK expires at the end of the month. Individual buyers in the US continue to enjoy a significant discount. I couldn’t possibly comment on the grounds for this discrimination. The discount is available to those using the order forms that can be downloaded from http://www.barder.com/wdd.

End of commercial! Watch this space for a forthcoming blog post that will seek to correct some common misconceptions about the possible consequences of another hung parliament following the UK general election in just five months’ time.

A quick web search reveals plenty of information about Eustace Grenville-Murray, including the texts of some of his writings and many references to him in the writings of others. But there has not hitherto been a full-length biography, and in his new book Professor Berridge describes some of the difficulties he has encountered in assembling the material for it:

First, his birth was illegitimate, so the records of his early life are either largely fictitious or non-existent. Second, because he was a whistleblower but relatively impecunious, he went to great lengths to cover his own literary tracks in order to safeguard his salaried income, so it is by no means easy to identify his writing, especially his newspaper articles. Third, because aristocrats both inside and outside the Foreign Office were desperate to contrive his downfall a whole raft of damaging myths was created about his official conduct and particular events in his life, and these have been constantly re-cycled – and inevitably embellished. … Finally, he left no personal collection of private papers – no private correspondence, no diaries, no unpublished memoirs…

Berridge closes his book with these words:

Grenville-Murray’s ultimate misfortune was that his two great patrons, Dickens and Palmerston, tugged him in opposite directions: the former to the literary exposure of social evils, the latter to the important work of diplomacy. He was no saint but it remains to his credit that, despite the tension between them and the strain that simultaneously plying these two trades imposed on his family, he made such a valuable contribution to both over such a long period. He deserves a better place in history than that pegged on the lazy re-cycling of the myths that he was a ‘scurrilous’ journalist deservedly ‘horsewhipped’ by a nobleman he had offended.

Two observations about this lively chronicle of an extraordinary life in diplomacy and journalism: first, its contemporary relevance (you can’t help noticing the partial parallels with another equally talented Murray whose controversial diplomatic career was eventually terminated by a hostile and exasperated Foreign Office); and, secondly, what an excellent film could be made of Berridge’s book, one that would be exciting and funny in equal parts. Conversion of the text to a film script wouldn’t be exceptionally difficult. It might need a voice-over narrator for which Geoff Berridge’s own distinctive voice would be ideal.

Professor G R Berridge

In the introduction to his book on his own website, Berridge sets out no fewer than 16 reasons for his decision to publish it as an ordinary PDF file on his website rather than submitting it to his publishers for publication as a book, whether in hard covers, as a paperback or as an e-book, or any combination of the three. All book publishers should take the precaution of thinking carefully about the professor’s 16 reasons, which have significant lessons for them. The downside seems to be the greater difficulty in spreading awareness of the existence of the book on a single semi-private website: very little chance of reviews in specialist or general interest journals or newspapers, no mentions in publishers’ lists or advertisements. It’s there, absolutely free and ready to be downloaded, but how many people know about it? It’s even quite easy to send it from one’s own computer to a Kindle, if you have a Kindle account, so that you can add it to your Kindle library to read on the train, or plane, or in your favourite Chinese restaurant when lunching or dining alone. So please heed this earnest plea: if you’re prompted by this to download and read A Diplomatic Whistleblower in the Victorian Era, and if you enjoy it as much as I did, spread the word about it, and send your friends and family without delay to http://grberridge.diplomacy.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/GrenvilleMurray.01.pdf.

PS: Full disclosure: Geoff Berridge is an old friend. A few years ago I made some modest contributions as Editorial Consultant to the first edition of his extraordinarily useful and readable Dictionary of Diplomacy: please see the Preface to the First Edition in subsequent editions. More recently he has proved an excellent mentor and literary godfather helping in very many ways to bring my own first (and last) book, What Diplomats Do, into a not particularly startled world — please see http://www.barder.com/4229.

Brian

]]>http://www.barder.com/4334/feed0Lloyd George in cartoons, by Alan Mumfordhttp://www.barder.com/4312
http://www.barder.com/4312#commentsSat, 04 Oct 2014 10:53:51 +0000http://www.barder.com/?p=4312Alan Mumford, leading collector of and expert on political cartoons, has produced another in his brilliant series of political cartoon biographies, this time of that always fascinating character David Lloyd George, the Welsh wizard (the one before Nye Bevan). Illustrated with numerous contemporary cartoons of the great but controversial man, some of them not previously published in modern times, the book’s text includes a highly readable potted biography of LG followed by an informative and lively commentary on the cartoons themselves, setting out their historical background and explaining political references in them with which the modern reader might be unfamiliar. Not all the cartoons are designed to be ‘funny’, but nearly all make an often sharp political or personal point with more impact in a smaller space than a paragraph of writing could hope to achieve.

Full disclosure: Professor Mumford and his wife Denise are among my own and my wife’s oldest (in both senses!) friends. Before Alan embarked on publishing his cartoon collection books, he had been the author and co-author of many authoritative and much esteemed books on management and management training. For details of all these you can do a search for ‘Alan Mumford’ on Amazon.

More information about this eminently collectable book is provided in the book’s flyer, including links to the page devoted to the book on the Lloyd George Society website and to the relevant page of the publishers’ website where you can order a copy of the book for the modest sum of £20 (+p&p). Please click on the picture below to see the full-size flyer and to access in it the web page for buying it.

PS: If you enjoyed the Mumford collection of Lloyd George cartoons, you’ll be sure to enjoy equally my own book describing “What Diplomats Do: the life and work of diplomats” — details and link to order form with generous discount here.

Brian

]]>http://www.barder.com/4312/feed0Scotland has saved the UK: now it’s time for self-government for Englandhttp://www.barder.com/4301
http://www.barder.com/4301#commentsSat, 20 Sep 2014 12:13:44 +0000http://www.barder.com/?p=4301We’ve barely stepped off the roller-coaster of the Scottish independence referendum, dizzy from the sudden swoops and dives but exhilarated to have survived as a country, before we’re plunged into another heated debate on how England is to win more control over its own internal affairs to match the increased powers for the Scottish parliament promised by the three UK party leaders as the price of Scotland’s vote to remain in the United Kingdom. Ever ready to take the low road of party political advantage at moments of historic importance for our country, David Cameron waited for hardly an hour after hearing the referendum result before announcing to the nation from No 10 Downing Street that he proposed to couple with the promised increase in devolved powers for Scotland arrangements to prevent Scottish MPs exercising their right to vote (or speak?) on legislation at Westminster affecting only England, representing this half-baked proposal as the answer to the West Lothian Question (which it certainly is not).

A slightly shortened version of my letter to the Guardian about this is published in today’s print edition of the newspaper while the full text of the letter as I submitted it appears on the Guardian’s website (here – scroll down to the third letter):

The referendum result is welcome and heartening. The prime minister’s instant reaction is neither. His false equation of the West Lothian question with “English votes on English laws” obviously foreshadows an attempt to fob us off with a clumsy constitutional fudge, pretending that MPs in English constituencies can be an acceptable substitute for an English parliament when they can provide no accountable English government, no English government departments or civil servants to staff them, no distinctive English elections, and no way of identifying draft legislation or other parliamentary business that will affect only England.

Increasing the powers of English local government bodies is similarly hopelessly inadequate. We English should refuse to accept anything short of our own parliament, with internal self-government at least equal to what is now promised to Scotland; and that inevitably requires, in turn, the extensive safeguards against English domination that only a full federal system can provide. Mr Cameron’s promise to solve these monumental constitutional issues, along with further devolution to Scotland, on the same timetable, within a few months, is frankly ludicrous.

Labour’s feeble and non-committal response to these great issues is terribly disappointing, especially after it was left to Alistair Darling and Gordon Brown to supply the intellectual and emotional case for preserving the United Kingdom. LibDem support for federalism is sound, but the LibDem voice is half-hearted and almost inaudible. We face the depressing prospect that the only political leader making the incontrovertible case for an English parliament and government is Nigel Farage. Labour needs to act urgently to prevent Ukip’s support for what plainly needs to be done becoming its kiss of death.

Brian Barder
London

Since I wrote my letter and submitted it to the Guardian Ed Miliband and one or two other Labour spokespersons have announced Labour’s rejection of Mr Cameron’s attempt to bounce the country into swallowing his plan for tinkering with the voting arrangements in the House of Commons by linking it to the promised timetable for more devolution of powers to Scotland and fast-tracking it through parliament before the UK general election due in May 2015. This opposition to Cameron’s plan meets one of the points in my Guardian letter.

Even more encouragingly, Labour seems to have committed itself yesterday (also after my letter was written) to holding a national constitutional convention to consider and make recommendations for overall changes in the UK constitution, presumably including addressing the glaring anomaly whereby of the four UK nations only England, the biggest and richest of the four, still lacks its own parliament and government, the organs without which no nation can take responsibility for its own internal affairs in the way that Scotland is close to doing, with Wales and Northern Ireland not far behind. This meets another of the central points in my Guardian letter, although some Labour statements muddy the waters by suggesting that the first task of the constitutional convention will be to consider increased powers for the English cities and regions, no doubt a commendable ambition but no substitute for the central need to establish an English parliament and government — whose responsibilities would certainly need to include the much-needed devolution of powers to the English cities and regions away from the federal centre at Westminster and from the English centre of power at Manchester or York or wherever else the English parliament and government is to be established. That kind of internal decentralisation within England is however a quite separate issue from the key question: namely, England’s need for the constitutional organs with which to govern itself. Precisely how decentralisation within England is to work should be for decision by the English people through their own elected parliament and government, not to be dictated to us in a tearing hurry by Mr Cameron’s quasi-federal all-UK government at Westminster, whose main preoccupation is clearly to score points against Labour in the run-up to next May’s elections.

I have listed in my Guardian letter above some of the killer arguments against the Tory claim that “English votes for English laws” can ever be an acceptable substitute for the belated establishment of self-governing organs for England and the extensive devolution to them of powers over internal English affairs similar to those already enjoyed by Scotland and those about to be added. Some other misconceptions need to be, er, scotched, if that’s the right word in present circumstances:

1. With partial devolution to three of the four UK nations we are already more than half-way into a federal system, but one that still lacks the essential safeguards inherent in full federalism against domination of the whole federation, and of the smaller member nations, by the biggest and most powerful of them.

2. The disproportionate size and power of England compared with the other three nations are a fact of UK life that is badly aggravated by the UK (or English?) disease of gross over-centralisation. An article in today’s Financial Times points out the utter imbecility of having HM Treasury in Whitehall laying down, through its control of local government budgets, the frequency of garbage collections in Liverpool. When we finally have a written federal constitution, one of its main principles (in addition to an entrenched Bill of Rights) should be to make the four national governments responsible for putting into effect in each of the four jurisdictions the principle of subsidiarity — that all decisions should be taken by institutions as close as possible to the people who will be affected by them, right down to ward councils and village mayors.

3. The disproportionate size and power of England compared with the other three nations are the main reason why Britain needs a federal system, not an obstacle to federalism. A federal constitution is essential to protect the three smaller nations against interference in their internal affairs by England or by the federal government and parliament at Westminster by laying down a well defined division of powers between the federal and national levels, and by providing for a federal second chamber in which each of the four nations has an equal number of elected representatives.

4. There’s bound to be some danger that the English government will tend to overshadow all the other federal and national governing organs by reason of England’s size, and the repercussions of what happens in England in the rest of the UK. But that’s a fact of geography and population which can’t be changed. The danger should not be exaggerated: the all-UK federal parliament and government at Westminster will have totally different powers and functions from those of the English national parliament and government at Manchester (or wherever), the latter dealing mostly with bread-and-butter issues such as health and education, the former principally with foreign affairs and defence — and with any additional subjects that the four nations agree are best handled on an all-UK basis and which they therefore devolve upwards to Westminster. Other subjects may be shared between the two levels. The two kinds of organ, federal and national, will attract different kinds of politician. The experience of existing successful federations such as Australia and the US should dispel any idea that even the biggest and most powerful second-tier governments, such as those of New York State or New South Wales, will overshadow their first-tier federal opposite numbers at Washington DC or Canberra.

Once we have parliaments and governments for all four nations, we shall in effect have a federal system. Much work will need to be done over several years to complete that process, including a written constitution and other safeguards. That will constitute the only definitive answer to the West Lothian Question. There will be no need to create categories of federal MP able to vote on this issue but not on that: matters affecting only the four nations, or some of them, simply won’t be within the competence of the federal organs, and vice versa. Other countries run successful federal systems and have solved most of the problems that federalism entails. Let’s not try to invent the wheel. We can learn from Australia and the US and many other models. All it needs is boldness — a commodity not much in evidence in our present polity.

Brian

]]>http://www.barder.com/4301/feed24Scotland’s independence referendum: some confusions in the commentariathttp://www.barder.com/4296
http://www.barder.com/4296#commentsFri, 12 Sep 2014 18:05:11 +0000http://www.barder.com/?p=4296There seem to be some dubious assumptions behind much of the current speculation from the commentariat south of the border:

(1) That there’ll be a in/out EU referendum in 2017 in the UK, whether or not it includes Scotland by then — which assumes a Tory overall majority at the next UK general election. Not a single opinion poll so far points to the likelihood of that happening. Of course it might, but as of now it’s extremely unlikely.

(2) That between a Scottish Yes vote next Thursday and whatever date is eventually set for Scotland to become independent, Scotland will be a foreign country and its MPs at Westminster will cease to take their seats: clearly wrong. Until the date of independence, which will depend on how long it takes to complete the separation negotiations, Scotland remains a part of the UK and its MPs remain UK citizens. At any UK election (such as that currently scheduled for May 2015) held before Scotland becomes formally independent, Scotland will continue to elect its MPs in the usual way. The UK parliament’s eventual legislation providing for Scotland to become independent on a specified date will need to include provision for MPs in Scottish constituencies to vacate their seats on that date. Presumably there will then need to be a fresh election in rUK (the rest of the UK).

(3) That the separation negotiations will be completed on the Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond’s timetable, i.e. within about two years from a Yes vote on 18 September. Highly unlikely, in my view. I can’t see the negotiations being completed in less than five years, given their complexity and the potential for strong disagreement on a long list of issues.

(4) That there’ll be no UK general election until May 2015: probably correct, but we shouldn’t rule out a scenario in which —

(a) David Cameron, the UK prime minister, resigns very soon after a Yes vote in Scotland, either of his own volition or with the LibDems and disaffected Tories voting with Labour for a No Confidence motion in the house of commons. (Many media commentators seem to have forgotten that the whole government resigns when a prime minister resigns);

(b) the Conservatives elect a new leader, presumably George Osborne;

(c) Mr Osborne (or whoever) tries but fails to form a government able to win a vote of confidence in the Commons, the LibDems refusing to join a new coalition with him; accordingly,

(d) there’s a UK general election before the end of 2014; and —

(e) Labour wins it with a very small overall majority, and takes control of the separation negotiations with Scotland. No EU in/out referendum.

So why are Labour’s leader, Ed Miliband, and his front bench colleagues not already emphasising publicly and on every possible occasion that in the event of a Yes vote by the Scots, the Cameron government will be totally discredited by the greatest failure since the loss of the American colonies in 1776? Why are they not promising that the moment a victory for Scottish independence is proclaimed, Labour will at once demand the government’s immediate resignation and the holding of a general election before the end of the year to decide which party is to lead the separation negotiations with Scotland? I have no idea why they are not. All I know is that they should be.

Brian

]]>http://www.barder.com/4296/feed22You can buy ‘What Diplomats Do’ with a substantial discounthttp://www.barder.com/4273
http://www.barder.com/4273#commentsSun, 24 Aug 2014 18:15:17 +0000http://www.barder.com/?p=4273If you’re reading this, you’re entitled to a substantially discounted price if you order your copy of my new book, What Diplomats Do, using the order form on my website at http://www.barder.com/wp-content/uploads/Flyer-What-Diplomats-Do-June14.pdf (for buyers in the UK, discount 20 per cent) or using WDD-Flyer-and-Order-Form-for-US (for buyers in the United States, with a whopping discount of 30 per cent off the list price).

For UK buyers the discount applies only to the hardback version of What Diplomats Do but not the e-book version, whether from the publishers, Rowman & Littlefield or from Amazon for your Kindle. For buyers in the US, the even bigger discount applies to both the hardback and the e-book (but not to Amazon and Kindle).

Please note that these order forms and discounts are only for individual buyers. Libraries, university departments and other institutional buyers wanting to buy or ask for inspection copies, and journals or other papers wanting a complimentary review copy, need to contact the publishers, Rowman & Littlefield, using the relevant link in the left-hand panel of https://rowman.com/. Please also note the advice on the US order form: “Rowman & Littlefield offers special discounts for bulk purchases in the U.S. by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more information, please contact Nancy Hofmann in the Special Markets Department at [1] 301-459-3366, ext. 5605.” I suggest that bulk buyers in the UK might use the contact addresses and other advice at http://www.nbninternational.com/Ordering/tabid/59/Default.aspx.

What Diplomats Do is not a memoir or autobiography. It aims to describe what working diplomats, not just ambassadors, actually do, day by day, in all the varied situations that they work in. It’s meant as a teaching tool for university (or school) teachers and students of international relations and diplomacy, but also as a guidebook for people contemplating a diplomatic career and above all as an entertaining and readable book for the general reader interested in current affairs. It has already won warm praise from eminent academic authorities in the field of diplomacy and also from equally eminent former ambassadors (see for example http://www.barder.com/wdd/reviews-of-what-diplomats-do). Although written from the viewpoint of a British diplomat (which I used to be), it’s equally valid as a description of the essence of what American and other European and indeed all diplomats do, although the terminologies and some of the procedures naturally vary.

If you want further information about the book, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with me by using the contact form at http://www.barder.com/contact, or by clicking ‘Contact me’ at the top of almost every page of my website, or by private email if you have my address.

Diplomacy is the art of giving all parties in a conflict what they need, if not what they want. Right now, the underpaid, mismanaged FCO staff are getting neither what they need nor what they want. Britain is weaker and less safe as a result.

So writes the Editor of The Independent, Amol Rajan, in Thursday’s London Evening Standard, in a stinging account of the marginalisation of a once great department of state (full disclosure: for which I worked for 30 years).

In her resignation letter of 5 August, Baroness Warsi, a former Co-Chair of the Conservative Party and Foreign Office minister, denounced the government’s policy on Gaza as —

[in]consistent with our values, specifically our commitment to the rule of law and our long history of support for International Justice. In many ways the absence of the experience and expertise of colleagues like Ken Clarke and Dominic Grieve has over the last few weeks become very apparent… William Hague was probably one of the finest Foreign Secretaries this country has seen… He dismantled foreign policy making by sofa government and restored decision making and dignity to the Foreign Office. There is however great unease across the Foreign Office, amongst both Minister[s] and senior officials, in the way recent decisions are being made.

The two greatest disasters in British post-war foreign policy, Suez (1956) and UK participation in the illegal attack on Iraq (2003), were at least partly attributable to the failure, indeed deliberate refusal, of the responsible prime ministers, Sir Anthony Eden and Tony Blair, to listen to the advice and warnings of the professional foreign affairs experts, including the legal advisers, in the Foreign & Commonwealth Office.

As Rajan’s article points out, one consequence of the steady devaluation of the FCO over many decades, as its resources have been mindlessly reduced while its responsibilities have been relentlessly increased, has been the absence of any coherent identifiable British foreign policy. Successive governments have constantly over-estimated British influence in world affairs, endlessly boasting about Britain’s ‘leadership role’, blind to the evidence of relative decline and indeed often explicitly denying it, while actually accelerating it by an extraordinary failure to play an active, constructive and cooperative role in Europe. Neither party has an identifiable policy on military intervention in the affairs of other states: in the weird muddle over the abortive proposal to join in air attacks on Syria, neither Labour nor the Conservatives felt able to declare unequivocally that such intervention without the prior authority of the UN Security Council (and other than in self-defence) would be in clear breach of the UN Charter and thus of international law — therefore an act of aggression and a war crime. No British government in recent times has laid down a coherent policy on the middle east, on China (threat? opportunity? who knows?), on reform of the Security Council (is Britain willing to give up or share its permanent seat and veto?) or on nuclear disarmament and the scandalous distortion of UK defence policy by the irrational refusal to scrap Trident, a so-called independent nuclear deterrent which is not independent and has no-one to deter, as crisply demonstrated by Simon Jenkins in the Guardian of 15 August. In a crisis, why do our prime ministers instinctively rush first across the Atlantic, not across the English Channel? It’s too late to reverse NATO’s reckless expansion eastwards or Putin’s reactive retrieval of Crimea, but why are we intent on punishing Russia instead of discussing a Ukraine settlement that will respect the interests of all parties to the conflict?

Amol Rajan tells us that —

Cameron’s close circle of foreign policy advisers in No. 10 and the Cabinet Office has explained in closed-door meetings to the diplomats in the FCO that the Prime Minister does not really think about strategy at all. Moreover, the feeling in King Charles Street and some of our missions is that many of these advisers owe their positions to old school ties rather than ability.

This persistent legacy of failure offers Ed Miliband and his colleagues an enormous opportunity to set out a coherent, rational and law-abiding foreign policy, rooted in and executed by the FCO, for an incoming Labour government. This will call for a degree of courage that has been conspicuously missing from our political leaders of all political colours in recent years: courage to take on the puerile sabre-rattling of the tabloids and the Murdoch press; courage to attack such shibboleths as Trident, the burned-out ‘two-state solution’ in the middle east, and the indefensible current composition of the Security Council; not least, courage to acknowledge the foreign affairs blunders of the Blair government, some of whose senior members still insist on defending their flawed records in parliament and the media. Labour’s motto in these and many other matters should be Danton’s: “il nous faut de l’audace, et encore de l’audace, et toujours de l’audace!” If Labour dared to adopt it, Mr Miliband’s fate might be happier than Danton’s: not the guillotine, but the keys to Downing Street.

Brian

]]>http://www.barder.com/4262/feed13The coalition government should resign forthwith if Scotland votes for independencehttp://www.barder.com/4241
http://www.barder.com/4241#commentsWed, 06 Aug 2014 12:12:49 +0000http://www.barder.com/?p=4241As of now (6 August 2014) the best guess must be that Scotland will vote to reject independence in the referendum on the 18th of next month. But there are still many undecided voters and most pundits predict a closer result than the opinion polls currently suggest. The possibility of a narrow majority for independence can’t be ruled out, and politicians and media analysts alike should be doing much more contingency planning and discussion against that possibility than seems to be happening. Among the major issues in the event of a majority Yes vote that ought to be actively considered by all the UK parties between now and the referendum is whether the coalition government should resign at once if defeated in the referendum, with fresh elections before the end of this year to elect a new government with a mandate to conduct the independence negotiations with Scotland. In my view it would be a constitutional outrage if Cameron and his coalition government refused to resign in such circumstances, for the reasons (among others) set out in my letter published in today’s Guardian:

A vote for Scottish independence is a vote for a pig in a poke
• The Guardian, Wednesday 6 August 2014Martin Kettle’s dystopian and all too credible prediction of the disastrous consequences of a majority for independence in the Scottish referendum in September (Remember 2014, the last summer of the old Britain, 31 July) suggests two possible variants of his scenario. First, David Cameron’s coalition government would surely have to resign immediately following such a catastrophic defeat. The incumbent government that had presided over the disintegration of our country as a direct result of its failure to offer Scotland a credible alternative to independence could hardly carry on as if nothing terrible had happened; and anyway there would be a pressing need for a new government with an electoral mandate to open and lead the negotiations with Edinburgh on the detailed terms of Scotland’s secession.

Second, the negotiations between Scotland and the rest of the UK (rUK) on the terms of secession would be quite likely to get bogged down in failure to agree on some key issues. If the best terms that the government at Holyrood was able to extract fell significantly short of the SNP’s demands, there might well be justified pressure from the Scottish people for a fresh referendum to establish whether those who had voted in 2014 for independence still favoured it on the only terms on offer following the negotiations. Come September, Scots will have to decide whether to buy a pig in a poke. They may well find that they don’t like the pig when it eventually emerges. However, it would be risky for Scots considering a yes vote in September to assume that they will have an opportunity later to change their minds if they don’t like whatever may emerge from negotiations with rUK.

Brian Barder
London

The Scottish Saltire

On the second point in my Guardian letter, there seems to be some doubt about whether ministers have allowed Whitehall to start planning for the consequences of a possible vote for independence on 18 September. Such an outcome would launch several years of intricate and often deeply divisive negotiations between a Scottish team, led by or perhaps comprising the SNP, on the one hand, and a team representing the rest of the UK (rUK), probably representing all the mainstream UK parties, on the other. Does the main steering brief for the rUK team in the negotiations already exist in Whitehall, setting out the rUK’s main aims in the negotiations, including its red lines on an independent Scotland’s currency; the future of rUK naval and military bases in Scotland (including HM Naval Base Clyde); and the allocation as between Scotland and rUK of North Sea oil revenues, the national debt, the armed forces, and a host of other assets and liabilities? Have the three main UK parties worked out agreed or differing policies on each of these vital issues? If they differ, how are the differences to be reconciled in conducting the negotiations if not by a mandate from the rUK electorate — which would mean publicly disclosing the rUK’s negotiating positions in advance? Perhaps most important of all: what will happen if, after perhaps several years of difficult and stormy negotiations, the two sides simply fail to reach agreement? In the last resort the rUK side can lay down the terms on which the UK parliament will be prepared to grant independence to Scotland, whether or not the Scottish side — almost certainly after fresh elections in Scotland — has agreed to them. What if the majority of Scots who will have voted Yes in 2014 don’t wish to become independent on the terms laid down by rUK following a breakdown or deadlock in the negotiations? In that perfectly plausible situation, is rUK prepared to force independence on Scotland even if a majority of Scots don’t want it on the rUK’s terms?

All these issues urgently need to be publicly aired and debated in the next six weeks if Scottish voters are to have even a hazy understanding of the likely consequences of their votes on 18 September. Have ministers and their officials, and the Labour leadership separately, thought them through and arrived at firm decisions on how to handle them in the negotiations with the Scots if the Yes vote wins? Are any of the three main UK parties ready for an October or November general election fought on the issue of the terms of separation to be offered to Scotland after a Yes vote on 18 September? I rather doubt it.

Brian

]]>http://www.barder.com/4241/feed11“What Diplomats Do”: Information for university teachers and book reviewers about new bookhttp://www.barder.com/4235
http://www.barder.com/4235#commentsSun, 27 Jul 2014 15:51:27 +0000http://www.barder.com/?p=4235This information is for university teachers of diplomacy or international affairs, and for editors and book reviewers. It supplements the information about What Diplomats Do, Brian Barder’s new book, now available at the publishers’ (Rowman & Littlefield) website, at https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781442226357; on my previous blog post at http://www.barder.com/4229; and in a new section on my website, starting at http://www.barder.com/wdd/.

University teachers who are considering whether to include What Diplomats Do in their students’ recommended or required course reading lists, or who have decided to do so, can request a free copy (“desk copy”, “inspection copy” or “exam copy”) from the publishers in order to assess it.

Similarly, editors of academic or general interest publications or their book review editors and reviewers may request a free review copy from the publishers, Rowman & Littlefield.

(University teachers and editors or reviewers may wish first to read the two sample chapters available in full online — see links at http://www.barder.com/wdd/.)

The following information about how to apply for free copies can be found on the publishers’ website:

Ordering printed exam copies:
To request a free exam copy, go to the individual book page and click on the Request a Free Exam Copy button. Printed exam copy orders are fulfilled within 7-10 business days.
Ordering printed exam copies not in our textbook program:
If the book you would like to review is not available as a free exam, click here [https://rowman.com/Request/Special] to make your request. We will contact you within the next business day.

Ordering desk copies:
If you have adopted a textbook for your course, click here to order your complimentary desk copy. Please allow 7-10 business days for delivery.
Other questions: If you have a specific question that does not pertain to a desk or exam copy request, please email textbooks@rowman.com.

Ordering e-exam copies:
We now offer e-exams of our textbooks which can be accessed within the next business day. Click here to preview our texts online or download an Adobe Reader or ePub file for a 60-day period. Another way to order an e-exam copy is to search for books on our website. You can then click on the e-exam button on individual book pages.

__________________________________

Review copies are available to genuine review editors and reviewers. Copies will be sent to relevant and recognized publications entirely at the publisher’s discretion. For any questions regarding review copies, please email reviews@rowman.com with your name, affiliation, and all contact information. [https://rowman.com/Page/ReviewCopyRequest]

nb: All this information comes from various pages on the Rowman & Littlefield website. If you need additional guidance, I suggest that you follow one of the web links or email one of the email addresses quoted. Good luck!

Brian

]]>http://www.barder.com/4235/feed0“What Diplomats Do – the life and work of diplomats” is published and available to orderhttp://www.barder.com/4229
http://www.barder.com/4229#commentsFri, 25 Jul 2014 18:39:54 +0000http://www.barder.com/?p=4229This blogger is the author of a book published by Rowman & Littlefield last week, What Diplomats Do: the life and work of diplomats. This is precisely what it says on the tin; it’s not another ex-diplomat’s thinly disguised, self-published memoirs. After writing millions of words in blog posts, articles, emails and letters, I have at last got round to writing a book. I shan’t do it again, so buy it now before the 20% discount offer lapses.

There’s more information about the book at http://www.barder.com/wdd/ (and pages to which it links — hat-tip: my IT guru, Owen), including: the full texts of two sample chapters (one of them the explanatory Introduction); extracts from some flattering pre-publication reviews by eminent academic teachers of diplomacy and international affairs and by some equally eminent former ambassadors; and an order form that you can download, fill in and send off if you want to get that 20% discount while it lasts.

What do diplomats actually do, not according to academic theory but as a matter of day-to-day reality? That is the question that this book seeks to answer by describing the various stages of a typical diplomat’s career. The book follows a genuinely fictional diplomat — no, he’s not me thinly disguised — from his application to join the national diplomatic service, through varied postings at home and overseas, culminating in his appointment as an ambassador, and eventually his retirement. Each chapter contains illustrative factual anecdotes, some more serious than others, drawn from the author’s 30 years’ experience as a diplomat, ending with postings in four countries in three continents as an ambassador and high commissioner.

What Diplomats Do examines various aspects of the life of a diplomat, contrasting his or her work in an affluent, friendly country with that in a developing country and one with a hostile government, describing the impact on personal and family life and personal security, as well as the privileges and drawbacks of serving as an ambassador. The writer discusses the potential influence of the individual diplomat in helping to formulate and carry out his government’s foreign policy decisions.

Rigorously academic in its coverage yet extremely lively and engaging, this unique work will serve as a primer to any students and junior diplomats wishing to grasp what the practice of diplomacy is actually like.

With that [diplomatic] experience and as the editor of the new edition of the classic diplomatic textbook Satow’s Diplomatic Practice, I hope that I can be considered capable of distinguishing a diplomatic hawk from a handsaw. So while books on diplomacy and diplomatic life are not a rarity, Brian’s offering fills a real gap in the market. It is neither a manual, though it offers excellent practical advice, nor is it a memoir though the text is interspersed with often entertaining and illuminating anecdotes. It does instead what it promises: it tells you exactly what it’s like to be a diplomat and what sort of challenges you face on an every-day basis.

I know of no other book on diplomacy which is so instructive as to procedure, entertaining in its examples, vivid and engaging in its style, massively authoritative, and original in its structure. A few passages dealing with real events are also gripping, notably that describing Sir Brian Barder’s recommendation – in the event momentous in its significance – to recommend a green light for RAF relief flights to Addis Ababa during the great Ethiopian famine in 1984. I think it is a brilliant book…

University and college teachers of diplomacy and international affairs can request an inspection or exam copy of the book from the publishers by clicking the relevant tab in the left-hand panel of the relevant web-page. Editors or reviewers at learned — or indeed unlearned — journals and newspapers can similarly ask Rowman & Littlefield for a review copy in the same way. Academic teachers in the field who have already read the book are unanimous — so far! — in saying that they will use What Diplomats Do as a teaching tool and will include it in their students’ recommended or required reading lists.

But What Diplomats Do is not formally a text-book, although it can serve as one; it is written just as much for the general reader with an interest in current affairs, who knows about diplomacy in general terms but who may be curious to know the kinds of things that individual diplomats — junior as well as senior, third secretaries as well as ambassadors — actually do between getting up in the morning, and slumping back into bed early the following morning, after a long day’s unglamorous work and (probably) a spectacularly tedious diplomatic dinner party that has dragged on into the small hours. What Diplomats Do fills in the gaps and aims to be an enjoyable as well as an informative read.

Brian

]]>http://www.barder.com/4229/feed3On foolishly trying to junk Mr Junckerhttp://www.barder.com/4170
http://www.barder.com/4170#commentsMon, 23 Jun 2014 17:54:03 +0000http://www.barder.com/?p=4170Britain has belonged to the European Union and its predecessors for the past 42 years. Yet some of our leaders, Conservative and Labour, apparently have little idea about the way it works. Iain Duncan-Smith, the Tory Work and Pensions Secretary, and Douglas Alexander, Labour’s Shadow Foreign Secretary, have both complained, in terms that suggest a surprising ignorance of EU realities, about the possibility of Jean-Claude Juncker, the former prime minister of Luxembourg, becoming President of the European Commission in the face of David Cameron’s ferocious opposition to him.

If they give Jean-Claude Juncker a job this is like literally [sic] flicking two fingers at the rest of Europe and saying to all the people out there, ‘We know that you voted the way you did but you are wrong and we are just going to show you how wrong you are by carrying on as though nothing happened.’

And Mr Alexander, for Labour, who according to Mr Watt “has instructed Labour MEPs not to support Juncker” [what, even if he’s unanimously nominated for the job by all the EU governments?], spoke in equally revealing terms:

There can be no excuses. David Cameron has a clear mandate from political parties here in the UK – including Labour – to build consensus across Europe for an alternative candidate for president of the commission.

Mr Duncan-Smith seems to think that the majority of the EU electorate has just voted to reject Mr Juncker for the post of Commission President. In fact, Mr Juncker was the preferred candidate of the EPP, the main centre-right group in the EU parliament, which won the most seats in last month’s election. So if the EU elections are any guide (which is debatable), Mr Juncker has a better claim on the job than anyone else.

It’s also meaningless to suggest, as Mr Alexander seems to have done, that at least the UK voters voted at the European elections in support of Mr Cameron’s opposition to Mr Juncker. Because of Mr Cameron’s eccentric and ill-judged decision, before becoming UK prime minister, to pull the UK Conservative party out of the EPP group to which its main natural allies in Europe belong, and to form a new group which he thought could be made more Euro-sceptic, there is now no UK party that belongs to the EPP group, and it was therefore impossible for any UK voter to vote either for or against Mr Juncker for the Commission Presidency. Where Mr Alexander’s “clear mandate” for Mr Cameron’s opposition to Mr Juncker comes from remains a mystery. If all he means is that he, Ed Miliband and Clegg have all agreed to oppose Juncker and to support Cameron’s reckless campaign against him, that hardly amounts to a ‘mandate': it’s more of a joint misjudgement.

It’s just as bizarre for Duncan-Smith and Alexander to speak as if the elections to the European parliament effectively equated to elections to the Presidency of the European Commission. The parallel with elections to the UK parliament, where the leader of the party winning the most seats in the House of Commons will normally become prime minister, is seriously misleading. In the case of the EU, it’s the European Council of Ministers – i.e. the EU heads of government – who have the duty and right to ‘nominate’ their preferred candidate for the Presidency of the Commission, who is then ‘elected’ – or rejected – by the European parliament. Of course in deciding whom to nominate to the EU parliament for the Commission Presidency, the EU governments will take account of opinion in the elected EU parliament, the biggest group in which campaigned last month for Mr Juncker as Commission President. If Mr Cameron somehow persuades his fellow members of the Council of Ministers to nominate a candidate other than Mr Juncker, the EU parliament might well refuse to elect him or her, and go on rejecting the EU governments’ nominees until they consent to nominate Mr Juncker. But the idea that in electing Tory, LibDem, Labour or UKIP MEPs to Brussels and Strasberg, British voters were expressing an opinion about Mr Juncker’s – or anyone else’s – suitability for the Commission Presidency is frankly fatuous. I doubt if as many as 1 percent of UK voters had ever heard of Mr Juncker.

Iain Duncan-Smith and Douglas Alexander might usefully be reminded of two further points.

First, last month’s EU elections in the UK can’t by any stretch of the imagination be regarded as an indication of the British people’s views on the best candidate for the Commission Presidency. No UK party campaigned at those elections for any particular candidate for that post, no UK party putting up candidates for the European parliament belonged to the EPP group which, elsewhere in Europe, was championing Mr Juncker for the job, and since the UK is unrepresented in the EPP group which won the elections, the UK’s MEPs will have little or no influence in the decision of the EU parliament on whether to elect or reject whoever is eventually nominated by the EU governments. This sorry situation results directly from David Cameron’s decision to pull his party out of the EPP group, ignoring the pleas of a bewildered Mrs Merkel and other European leaders who might otherwise have had some sympathy with Mr Cameron’s problems.

Secondly, our party leaders might be reminded that there is no consensus in Britain about the kind of EU reforms that Mr Cameron and his Euro-sceptic party are demanding. Just because all three of the main political parties in Britain, and indeed in many other European countries, recognise the need for “reform” of the EU, it doesn’t mean that they agree on which reforms they want. The UK Tories, for example, want to weaken the power of the EU to regulate safeguards for employees’ work conditions throughout the Union. They resent this EU power in the name of what they euphemistically refer to as “flexible labour laws”. Our UK Tories want to be relieved of EU constraints on their right to make our workers work longer hours, for lower rates of pay, with fewer rights to maternity, paternity and other holidays, and generally in worse conditions, than those in our more enlightened EU partner countries. We need a promise that this is one of many Cameron ‘reforms’ that Labour will never support.

Nor should Labour support the Tories’ demand for limits to be imposed on the free movement of people within the EU, or for abandonment of the principle that all EU citizens, in whichever EU country they live, work or visit, are equally entitled to health and other social benefits. We all favour ‘reform’, as we all favour motherhood, but one party’s reforms are another’s erosion of the basic principles underlying the EU. The Union, that institution to which we belong, and from which we derive such enormous benefits, is one which many people all over our continent still, despite all the disappointments and disillusionments, find genuinely inspiring. Labour should never compromise its European credentials in order to try to appease the Euro-sceptics of the Murdoch press and the wilder reaches of the Conservative back benches. We can leave that doomed attempt at appeasing ignorance and reaction to Mr Cameron and Mr Duncan-Smith.

Our prime minister has embarked on another of his wild gambles. If he pulls it off and our partner governments are blackmailed into dispensing with Mr Juncker’s services, David Cameron’s and other Tories’ triumphalist gloating will be hard to endure, and Britain will incur the odium of widespread opinion throughout the EU for depriving them of their favourite candidate. If he fails, Britain will have to cope for five years or more with a powerful President of the Commission who’ll bear an entirely understandable grudge against all three of the UK’s political parties for having tried so hard, for so little reason, to prevent his selection for the job. It’s a lose-lose situation, as usual.

]]>http://www.barder.com/4170/feed5It ain’t over till the well-built lady sings*http://www.barder.com/4164
http://www.barder.com/4164#commentsSun, 25 May 2014 14:41:50 +0000http://www.barder.com/?p=4164I lay no claim to expertise on the subject of opera, although there are several operas that I very much enjoy, notably those of Mozart and Richard Strauss, and of the latter Der Rosenkavalier most of all. I can’t afford to go and see, or hear, the current production of Rosenkavalier at Glyndbourne, but I’ve been fascinated by the fracas over the reviews in some of the UK broadsheet newspapers which have made unpleasantly personal remarks about the young Irish mezzo soprano Tara Erraught, playing Octavian in Strauss’s masterpiece. All the critics have been full of praise for Ms Erraught’s beautiful voice and brilliant singing, but the praise has been marginalised by several distinguished critics’ ungentlemanly allusions to the her figure and stature (or lack of it), calling her “unbelievable, unsightly and unappealing” (The [London] Times) “dumpy” (The Independent) and with an “intractable physique” (The Daily Telegraph). Andrew Clark in the Financial Times wrote: “Tara Erraught’s Octavian is a chubby bundle of puppy-fat.” The Guardian described her as “stocky”.

For the sake of the operatically challenged who are not familiar with Rosenkavalier, Octavian, the character being played by Tara Erraught at Glyndbourne, is a handsome youth (written for and played by a woman) who’s having an affair with an older woman — and who at a certain point in the action has to be disguised as (guess what) a girl. (The McGuffin of a girl playing the part of a boy who gets dressed up as a girl is of course familiar from Shakespeare through many other operas down to pantomime.) In modern times Octavian is generally played by a tall and athletic young woman singer who can reasonably plausibly pass herself off as a teen-age boy.

Other opera singers, mostly female, have sprung to Ms Erraught’s defence, denouncing her critics’ references to her physique as sexist, offensive, irrelevant to what they say should have been their sole concern (the quality of her singing), and on all these gounds illegitimate. One of the offending critics has apologised; others have rejected the charges against them on the grounds that the unsuitabilty of an actor (whether male or female, singer or not) for his or her role represents poor casting and thus a proper subject of discussion by professional critics.

Rarely without an opinion on current controversies, I expressed mine in my usual manner, namely a letter to the Guardian, which published it on 24 May:

Cruel aspersions cast by music critics on the physical appearance of an opera singer are contemptible, like any other cruelty (Disgust in opera world at ‘sexist’ criticisms of soprano star, 21 May). But some singers who have denounced the critics overstate their case, claiming for example that opera’s magic “is not about lights, it is not about costumes, it’s not about sets, it’s not even about sex or stature … It is all about the human voice … opera is all about the voice” (open letter by Alice Coote).

If that were so, there would be no point in training opera singers to act as well as sing, or in mounting productions in which not only the music and singing but also the acting, sets, costumes, lighting, and the audience’s ability to identify the performers with the characters they play, all contribute to the impact of the event. If those other ingredients really counted for nothing, an audio CD or a concert performance would be just as satisfying as a staged production, which they obviously are not.

All these ingredients are legitimate subjects of comment and criticism by music critics, provided that they express themselves in civil language not calculated to leave lasting scars on the object of their remarks. If the (fictitious) one-legged Dudley Moore had been successful in his famous audition for the part of Tarzan, his physical unsuitability for that part would surely have been a legitimate subject of comment, regardless of the film’s merits.Brian BarderLondon

The controversy rages on. I wonder whether it is causing a spike or a slump in demand for tickets to Glyndbourne?

]]>http://www.barder.com/4164/feed5Mr Clegg wants to remain in government. A minority Labour government should deny him that privilegehttp://www.barder.com/4149
http://www.barder.com/4149#commentsFri, 02 May 2014 15:36:36 +0000http://www.barder.com/?p=4149The Sunday Times magazine of 27 April 2014 carries a wonderfully illuminating interview with Nick Clegg, the leader of the LibDems and deputy prime minister in the Tory-led coalition government which no-one intentionally elected in 2010. The interview, by Anne McElvoy, public policy editor of The Economist, perhaps inadvertently makes a powerful case for Labour, if it wins more seats than anyone else in a hung parliament, to govern without a coalition with the LibDems or anyone else, ideally under a ‘confidence and supply’ arrangement in which the LibDems, or any other party holding the balance of power in another hung parliament, would support the minority government in its budget legislation and in votes of confidence, but would be free to help to defeat it in the House of Commons on individual issues without such defeats requiring the government to resign. (This is a more accurate description of ‘confidence and supply’ than Ms McElvoy’s definition in her article.)

Because of the difficulty of reading this revealing article online, and because it includes such charmingly naive declarations of Mr Clegg’s earnest desire to go on being deputy prime minister, election after election, regardless of which of the bigger parties wins the most seats in the election, I am reproducing below extensive passages from Ms McElvoy’s pitiless deconstruction of Mr Clegg:

On the way up to [Nick Clegg’s] Sheffield seat, he wants to get something off his chest, which could well play a decisive role in the aftermath of the 2015 election, should no party emerge with a clear majority. In the event of a hung parliament ,which many pollsters consider likely, he says: “My party would not be interested in propping up a minority government without coalition. It isn’t a role I would see as right for myself or the Liberal Democrats.” …. In other words, the deputy PM will only settle for full coalition – which means he intends to remain in the job, if no party wins an overall majority in next May’s general election.

For the first time, Clegg is explicitly ruling out any kind of loose pact arrangement, like the short-lived Lib-Lab one in the 1970s or variants on “confidence and supply” arrangements, a political anoraks’ phrase., whereby a smaller party provides support in parliamentary votes for one of the main parties, but without any official deal on ministerial jobs or influence. No, says Clegg: if they want his party, they need to put up with coalition influence – and, by implication, him in a big role. “I want to remain in government. We’ve only just got started and a 10-year period for us in government means we could make a major contribution. The last thing I want to do is give up this job .”

It’s the kind of chutzpah that plays straight to his detractors’ view of Clegg as a self-aggrandising type. He says he objects to Labour and the Tories assuming that they have “a monopoly on power”. Lib Dems should be “a political force in the life of this county – not just a think-tank”. The charge that he is “power-hungry”, he adds, “tends to come from people with no qualms about seeking it for their own side”.

Ten years of Deputy Clegg is not a prospect that will gladden the hearts of Tories, who blame him for watering down Conservative rule. Meanwhile, seasoned Labour figures mutter that having seen Clegg hold his coalition partner hostage in some areas, a minority Labour government would be a better option than an alliance with Clegg if they fall just short of outright victory next May. Clegg snorts derisively that this is “swashbuckling stuff, but when it comes down to it a minority government would be unstable”. This may be true—but, unsurprisingly, the Tories and Labour deem it presumptuous that he assumes they can only make it work with him in tow.

…One of [Michael] Gove’s main advisers until his departure at the end of last year was the combative Dominic Cummings. He told the BBC’s World at One last month that Clegg’s plan to extend free school meals had been a chaotic policy, announced on the hoof, solely for political gain with his left-leaning base…. When I contact Cummings, he unleashes a far more personal attack. “Nick Clegg is the worst kind of modern MP,” he says via email. “He is self-obsessed, sanctimonious and so dishonest he finds the words truth and lies have ceased to have any objective meaning, and he treats taxpayers’ money with contempt. He won’t do the hard work to get policy right – all he cares about is his image. He is a revolting character. And I say that after spending 15 years at Westminster.”

As putdowns go, this must be a contender for the Malcolm Tucker memorial prize. “Whenever Clegg gave a speech, he’d demand that we spend hundreds of millions of taxpayers’ money for his latest absurd gimmick,” Cummings continues. … “We thwarted Clegg as much as we could,” Cummings says cheerfully. “We ignored his appalling Home Affairs Committee which he abuses for his own personal ends. We kept the Free Schools process and exam reform out of his hands, so he couldn’t subvert them too.”

… It’s not a world [Nick Clegg] wants to give up. ”I’d very much like to continue in government,” he says emphatically, comparing coalition to a “fascinating laboratory” of mixed ideas. Ultimately, the random forces of the electorate will determine whether Clegg is a one-term deputy PM or a fixture in British politics: grumbled about, but tolerated.

Perhaps the men in grey sandals will get him first. If Clegg has one combination of assets that could save his skin, it is a mixture of self-belief and a stubborn refusal to give way. Coalition, he muses, “is full of bumps and scrapes”. He’s had more than a few of those – the Third Man of British politics, who wants to stick around. [Emphasis added.]

In the course of the article, Anne McElvoy usefully reminds us of the democratic credentials of this claimant to a permanent place in government for his party and permanent occupation of the post of deputy prime minister for himself:

[In the 2010 general election] the Lib Dems won 57 seats with 23% of the vote… Clegg’s poll ratings in mid-April [2014] were between 9 and 11%, un-boosted by the publicity of two televised LBC debate clashes with Ukip’s Farage.

Mr Clegg is not by a long chalk the only UK politician who enjoys being a government minister and who would like to remain one for a long time, without the inconvenience of his party first needing to win a majority or plurality in the House of Commons at a general election. But his claim to be able to force whichever of the main parties wins the most seats in a hung parliament next year into a coalition with the LibDems under his leadership is a transparent bluff. First, there’s no guarantee that the LibDems, led by a deeply unpopular Nick Clegg and tarnished by five years propping up the most reactionary and incompetent Tory or Tory-led administration for a generation, will win enough seats in the new House of Commons to hold the balance of power and thus to be able to decide whether Ed Miliband or David Cameron[1] gets the keys to Number 10 Downing Street. Secondly, if the LibDems do hold the balance of power in the 2015 election, the only sanction available to Mr Clegg against a refusal by a minority Labour or Tory government to include the LibDems in a new coalition will be to threaten to defeat the minority government on the floor of the House of Commons and to demand fresh elections. But there is no constitutional requirement that the Queen should agree to dissolve parliament and call fresh elections just because Mr Clegg wants her to. There might be another combination of parties able to command the confidence of a majority in the House of Commons without the cost and annoyance of another election soon after the first. Or, even if a dissolution and fresh elections are granted, there is every likelihood that the electorate, cross with the LibDems and (probably) the Tories for defeating Labour before it had had a chance to show how its manifesto promises would work, would desert them in droves and vote to give Labour an overall majority in the new parliament, in which the LibDems would at once revert to well deserved obscurity. Would Nick Clegg really be prepared to hold this gun to his own head and bravely pull the trigger?

Whatever Mr Clegg’s preference in the matter, much the best option for Labour as the biggest party in another hung parliament will be to carry out as much as it can of its election manifesto programme as a minority government, accepting defeat where necessary on some measures but pressing on regardless with the rest. A coalition with the LibDems, assuming that they had enough seats to make up a majority in the House, would be constantly paralysed by LibDem refusal to accept the reversal of the reactionary and counter-productive coalition policies and laws of which they have been joint sponsors during the years of the present Conservative-led coalition government. Progressive Labour policies would have to be repeatedly watered down to satisfy LibDem objections in a string of unsatisfactory horse trades. A Labour minority government would be well placed to dare the opposition parties to frustrate a progressive and potentially popular programme: if they did, they could expect to pay a heavy electoral price when it became clear that the business of government could not be effectively carried out and that the only escape from deadlock would be a dissolution and an early second election. In such an election the electorate might, with luck, be relied on to punish the opposition parties for frustrating necessary Labour measures and for wishing on it another wearisome and unnecessary election, from which Labour could reasonably hope to emerge this time with an overall majority.

So a Labour minority government and resistance to demands for another coalition are clearly Labour’s least bad option if Labour wins the most seats in another hung parliament. Mr Clegg would miss his ministerial car and driver, his red boxes and his seat on the government front bench. If so, tough.

[1] Footnote: I assume for the sake of argument that David Cameron will still be leader of the Conservative party in May 2015 when the next general election is due to take place. However, if Scotland votes for independence in September 2014, it’s difficult to see how a prime minister who will have presided over the dissolution of the United Kingdom as a direct result of his personal complacency, ignorance, failure of judgement and incompetence could remain in office for another eight fraught post-referendum months. In such circumstances Mr Cameron’s resignation would seem inevitable. When the prime minister resigns, the rest of the government automatically resigns with him, although it doesn’t necessarily follow that there is a new general election for a new government. In that case would George Osborne or Boris Johnson have replaced Mr Cameron as prime minister by May of next year? Or would Ed Miliband have moved into Number 10 following the resignation of the Cameron-Clegg coalition and a fresh general election in October or November of 2014? That question goes well beyond the scope of this post, and is not directly relevant to its argument. But it certainly deserves to be discussed and debated nevertheless, and with some urgency — elsewhere.

I hasten to make it clear that I would emphatically not regard the loss of Scotland as a price worth paying for the collapse of the Cameron-Clegg coalition eight months earlier than scheduled, much as I would welcome the latter. Scottish secession would be a catastrophe for Britain (and probably, although not necessarily, for Scotland). Another eight months of the Tory-led coalition after the referendum would be a heavy burden, but Britain would survive it, and even recover from it eventually.

Uopdate (8 May 2014): A lively debate on the main issues discussed here is going on in comments on a shortened version of this post on LabourList: see http://bit.ly/1jkkfTT.

Brian

]]>http://www.barder.com/4149/feed4IPPs: please urge your MP to sign this important early Day Motionhttp://www.barder.com/4145
http://www.barder.com/4145#commentsWed, 09 Apr 2014 17:36:28 +0000http://www.barder.com/?p=4145Please urge your MP to sign the following excellent Early Day Motion (EDM 1254) tabled in the House of Commons. It sets out very clearly the appalling situation that the thousands of remaining prisoners serving IPPs (“indeterminate sentences for public protection”) find themselves in despite the abolition by the present government of the IPP system as unjust and ineffective, and calls for additional funding for the Parole Board to enable it to speed up the processing of IPP prisoners who have served the punishment part of their sentences (their tariffs) with a view to releasing most of them without further intolerable delay. This delay is a blot on our society, as was the original IPP sentence introduced by the last government.

Grateful thanks to Mr Elfyn Llwyd MP for his initiative in tabling this motion, and to its other sponsors. And a hat-tip to Shirley Debono for alerting me to it.

That this House notes that at the end of January 2014, 5,335 prisoners in the UK were still serving indeterminate sentences for public protection, which were abolished by the Government in 2012; further notes that 3,561 of these prisoners had already passed their tariff and that, since the Parole Board releases roughly 400 inmates every year, it will take nine years for the Board to clear this backlog of cases; further notes with dismay that many prisoners serving indeterminate sentences fail to gain places on appropriate courses which would progress their rehabilitation and that as a result such prisoners have little hope of release; recognises that 24 prisoners serving indeterminate sentences have committed suicide whilst in custody; further notes that each prison place costs £40,000 every year, making indeterminate sentences highly costly; and calls on the Government to increase funding to the Parole Board to clear the backlog of indeterminate prisoners, starting with those given initial tariffs of two years or less.

The more MPs who sign this EDM, the more notice the government (and the Parole Board) will have to take of it. It probably won’t ever be debated or passed, but it’s a very useful form of pressure.

For more information about IPPs and the scandalous abandonment of thousands of IPP prisoners long after they have paid their debt to society, please see http://www.barder.com/4119.

Brian

]]>http://www.barder.com/4145/feed8Western competition with Russia for Ukraine: divisive, destructive and doomedhttp://www.barder.com/4140
http://www.barder.com/4140#commentsWed, 09 Apr 2014 15:43:17 +0000http://www.barder.com/?p=4140Since I wrote about Ukraine in my blog post of 2 March, provoking a vigorous and mostly healthy debate, the role of the EU’s association agreement with Ukraine has looked increasingly significant. The UK media – those parts of them that I see and hear, anyway – have been curiously reticent about this agreement and what it says about the west’s intentions as regards relations with Ukraine. I wrote to the Guardian about it.

[Letter to the Guardian letters editor, 21 March 2014:]

The EU has reportedly carried out its threat [on 21 March 2014] to sign the ‘political parts’ of its inflammatory and divisive association agreement with Ukraine’s interim (and dubiously legal) government, as forecast in [the Guardian’s] report under the sadly inappropriate heading “EU showing reluctance to escalate Crimea backlash” (p2, 20 March). This deserves much more attention and indeed alarm than it has so far received. It was the then elected Ukrainian president Yanukovych’s refusal to sign this agreement that triggered his unconstitutional deposition and the installation of the current western-backed interim régime in Kiev.

The agreement requires Ukraine steadily to “approximate” its legislation to that of the EU, a process to be monitored and even enforced by the EU, and sets up a political dialogue designed explicitly to “promote gradual convergence on foreignand security matters with the aim of Ukraine’s ever-deeper involvement in the European security area”. It’s difficult for Moscow or anyone else to interpret these proposed commitments otherwise than as steps leading to eventual Ukrainian membership of the EU and subsequently of NATO (“the European security area”). For the EU now to sign such an agreement with the unelected interim Kiev régime, months ahead of the election of a new government and president, is bound to escalate the crisis. It will intensify Russia’s understandable suspicions of western intentions and fears of encirclement. If the EU genuinely wants de-escalation, it should seek to allay, not intensify, Russia’s suspicions by declaring that Ukrainian membership of either the EU or NATO is not on the cards and never will be, leaving the political elements of the ill-conceived association agreement permanently in the Pending tray. We hear plenty about the stick, but where’s the carrot?

A sharp western response to Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea is plainly required, but we need much more clarity about whether current and proposed sanctions are meant to be a punishment or a deterrent (quite different things), and about the exit strategy that western governments have in mind, given that annexation of Crimea now seems a fait accompli.

Brian Barder
London SW18
21 March, 2014

My letter was not published. No complaint: it was rather dry.

Ten days later the following Parliamentary Question and (written) Reply appeared in Hansard:

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs whether the commitment in the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement signed by the EU and the interim Ukraine administration on 21 March 2014 to a political dialogue designed to promote gradual convergence on foreign and security matters with the aim of Ukraine’s ever-deeper involvement in the European security area reflects an EU policy objective of Ukraine eventually joining NATO; and if he will make a statement.

Written reply:David Lidington (The Minister for Europe; Aylesbury, Conservative)

While NATO and the EU play complementary and mutually reinforcing roles in supporting international peace and security, they are separate organisations. There is no connection between the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement and NATO membership.
Ukraine, has a long standing relationship with NATO and is a valued contributor to a number of NATO operations. The UK Government continues to support defence reform in Ukraine and hopes that its Government will continue to work with NATO in the future.Hansard source (Citation: HC Deb, 31 March 2014, c433W)

Caroline Lucas MP (Green) asked an excellent question. The minister’s reply is not however satisfactory, because it doesn’t answer the question (does the passage quoted from the EU-Ukraine agreement reflect an EU objective of Ukraine eventually joining NATO?), and the Russians will have their work cut out parsing the carefully worded statement that “There is no connection between the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement and NATO membership.”

Why did Russia act with such blatant disregard for international law and with such haste to annex Crimea? It’s no excuse for President Putin to say, as he does, that the west has behaved with far more contempt for international law with their bloody attacks on or military interventions in Yugoslavia (over Kosovo), Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya (in the last two there was UN authority for a limited intervention but the limitations imposed by the Security Council’s mandate were ignored). As for Russia’s unseemly haste to grab back Crimea, why was the EU in such a hurry to sign the EU Association Agreement with an unelected interim administration in Kiev, headed by an unelected interim President and blatantly unrepresentative of the Ukrainian people, when the previous democratically elected President had been deposed, with western encouragement, for refusing to sign the agreement and when democratic elections for a new President and a new government of Ukraine are to take place in just a few weeks’ time?

Perhaps the Russian policy analysts in Moscow had taken the trouble to read the EU-Ukraine agreement signed on 21 March (unlike most of the commentariat servicing the UK media, apparently). Perhaps they had spotted the passages in the agreement highlighted in my unpublished letter to the Guardian and in Caroline Lucas’s parliamentary question. Perhaps they, like some of us in the west, wondered whether the EU was in such a hurry to get the agreement signed because they planned to act quickly to link the whole of Ukraine, including Crimea with its vital Russian naval base, so tightly to the EU and then to NATO that it would become impossible for Crimea to continue to act as host to a major Russian naval base. Immediate action by Russia to re-detach Crimea from Ukraine and re-integrate it with Russia might have seemed a prudent way to pre-empt any such western intention with a minimum of bloodshed and international fuss. From Moscow’s point of view a policy of wait-and-see may have seemed simply too risky, with so much at stake.

And perhaps, after Crimea had been unceremoniously re-attached to Russia, those Moscow policy wonks might have read the British government’s non-reply to Ms Lucas’s pointed question, and concluded that they were probably right to interpret the EU agreement in the way they did, and right to recommend securing Crimea and the vital base in Sevastopol for Russia in the way the Russian government did, before it was too late.

It’s time for the west – the EU and NATO – to decide what it wants in its future relations with Ukraine, and whether to treat Russia as a competitor or an associate in those relations. The west currently adopts a nakedly adversarial attitude towards Moscow, apparently aiming to subvert Russia’s influence with its near neighbour and to replace it with Ukraine’s “gradual convergence on foreign and security matters with the aim of … ever-deeper involvement in the European security area” – in the words of the EU-Ukraine agreement. Such a policy risks widening the divisions within Ukraine in a way that can only destabilise the country to the point where Russian intervention may become inevitable. Ukraine is far more important to Russia, both psychologically and in terms of security, than it is to the EU or NATO: so if competition for influence becomes a game of chicken, the west is bound to blink first. But the consequences of a competition culminating in Russian physical intervention in Ukraine would be disastrous, both for Russia and for the west. Such a crisis could well wreck any chance of a constructive relationship between Russia and the west for a generation. Russia would be driven back into xenophobic autocracy; any lingering hopes of a recognisable Russian liberal democracy would be crushed.

There’s an obvious alternative: instead of seeking to supplant Russian interests in Ukraine, the west could actively seek Russian cooperation in stabilising the area and jointly promoting its economic and political recovery. Two acts in particular would signal a constructive change of course. First, the west should declare that Ukrainian membership of the EU and NATO is not on the cards, since Ukraine’s geography and history alike point to the need for its neutrality between east and west. Since neither the US, the UK or France would in any conceivable circumstances go to war with Russia over Ukraine, its admission to NATO would constitute a betrayal in waiting, so ruling it out in advance would cost nothing and could potentially represent a major advance as a reassurance to Russia, as well as forcing the Ukrainians to face up to the reality of their geography. Secondly, the west should endorse Russia’s proposal for a federal system within Ukraine and offer its practical help, in collaboration with Moscow, in bringing it about. Greater autonomy for eastern Ukraine within a federal state would satisfy the ambitions of many Russian-speaking Ukrainians. It’s hard to understand why the west has so far ignored this constructive proposal from Moscow.

Time is short. Small pro-Russian groups are occupying government buildings in eastern Ukraine and declaring themselves independent, arousing suspicions that Russia is encouraging them to create a pretext for intervention, when the reality might be that these groups are acting independently of Moscow in the hope of forcing the Russians to step in. Current four-power talks at official level have a great deal hanging on them: not just the future of Ukraine, which is important enough, but also the future of Russia and its role in the world, which is incomparably more so.

[Footnote: Much of this blog post goes over ground partly covered by an earlier post at http://www.barder.com/4126. That attracted a good many comments, some hostile and vigorously expressed, some strongly supportive. The authors of all such comments on that earlier post can take it that their comments apply equally to this one, and that there is no need to repeat them here, unless of course they have something new to say or new information to supply.]

Brian

]]>http://www.barder.com/4140/feed3Concerned about IPPs still in indefinite preventive detention? Watch Newsnight on 13 Marchhttp://www.barder.com/4136
http://www.barder.com/4136#commentsWed, 12 Mar 2014 16:26:33 +0000http://www.barder.com/?p=4136Last month I wrote yet again about the national scandal of Indeterminate Sentences “for Public Protection”, or IPPs. Long after IPPs have been abolished and can no longer be imposed, literally thousands of people who were given IPP sentences before abolition are still in what amounts to preventive detention in the harshly punitive conditions of our prisons. The majority of them have completed the punishment part of their sentences and are now warehoused behind bars because men (and women) in suits are frightened that if released they might re-offend. The criteria for agreeing to release them are so Kafkaesque, so heavily weighted against even the most innocuous IPP prisoner, that those still incarcerated and their families begin to fear that they will never be released. Parliament has given the Justice Secretary (the government minister responsible) powers to reform the criteria for releasing IPPs unless they clearly pose a serious threat to public safety, but the Justice Secretary refuses to exercise them.

Those concerned about this monstrous situation should watch the BBC2 television programme Newsnighttomorrow, starting at 10:30pm on Thursday, 13 March. Watch it live on television or on your PC or laptop, live or later. Please record it if you can and ask your friends round to watch it later. Then persuade them to write furiously angry letters to their MPs — again — demanding long overdue action to remedy this grotesque injustice by the man now responsible for it: Mr Chris Grayling, the Tory Secretary of State for Justice. Justice!

Brian

]]>http://www.barder.com/4136/feed11Ukraine: time for the west to pull back toohttp://www.barder.com/4126
http://www.barder.com/4126#commentsSun, 02 Mar 2014 11:28:44 +0000http://www.barder.com/?p=4126Solemn British commentators on the Ukraine crisis are wringing their hands over the west’s alleged inability to do anything to de-escalate the situation in Ukraine in the face of alarming Russian military activity, including powerlessness to persuade the Russians to pull back from their militaristic moves before the tension breaks out into war. They are wrong. There is one move that the west can and should make that would help to undo the consequences of recent western policy blunders, reassure Moscow about Russia’s legitimate strategic and security interests in its own region, and compel Ukraine’s leaders of all communities to adopt a more realistic attitude to its geopolitical situation and the limits which that imposes on its options. The west needs urgently to give a clear and unconditional assurance that there can be no question of Ukraine, or any part of Ukraine, ever becoming a member of either the EU or NATO.

This would be no more than a recognition of reality. Russia’s interests in Ukraine – strategic, cultural and historical, and personal (a third of Ukrainians speak Russian as their first language, nearly a fifth are Russian citizens[1]) – are such that no government in Moscow could passively stand by while the closest of its neighbours is being drawn into the west’s orbit. The west’s reckless dangling of an unfulfillable promise of EU and even NATO membership in front of successive incompetent and corrupt Ukrainian regimes, contemptuously ignoring Russian concerns, bears a large part of the responsibility for the mess we’re all now in.

The dangerous crisis in Ukraine, and especially in Crimea, will not be resolved by pompous condemnation of Russia’s aggression or by unconvincing warnings of high but undefined costs for Russia if it continues to violate Ukraine’s integrity – warnings that sound especially hypocritical coming from politicians (not, incidentally, including Barack Obama) who vociferously supported western illegal aggression against Yugoslavia in 1999 and against Iraq in 2003. The grandstanding rush by our foreign secretary, William Hague, to Kiev today is misconceived. It will be interpreted as implying a renewed commitment of some kind to UK support for the revolutionaries in Kiev, many of whom are still dreaming of eventual membership of the EU, if not also of NATO. Is that interpretation what Mr Hague intends? If so, he should not be in charge of UK foreign policy.

If anyone should be rushing overseas in search of de-escalation, it should be to Brussels to agree without more delay on declarations by the EU and NATO of the impossibility of Ukrainian membership of either. Meanwhile western leaders should be telling the Russians that we are working towards such a declaration; that it is no part of EU or NATO policies to threaten Russia’s legitimate interests in Crimea or the rest of Ukraine: that it is in Russia’s, the west’s, and Ukraine’s interests that stability, prosperity and uncorrupt government should be promoted in Ukraine; and that the EU and the US wish to discuss with Moscow institutional arrangements for cooperation in economic support for Ukraine once a stable, representative and democratically legitimate régime has been installed in Kiev.

The basis for such a peacemaking initiative by the west as an alternative to the spear-waving bluster advocated by, for example, Sir Malcolm Rifkind (among many others), is set out in eloquent and scholarly terms by one of the greatest British diplomats of our time, Sir Rodric Braithwaite, a former British ambassador to Moscow, in an article in today’s Independent on Sunday which should be required reading for all those who are indulging their out-dated cold war prejudices by sanctimoniously denouncing Mr Putin for doing what any great power leader in his position would be bound to do. Selectively quoting Sir Rodric, —

Much recent comment on Ukraine in the British press has been marked by a barely forgivable ignorance about its history and politics, an overhasty willingness to put the blame for all its troubles on Vladimir Putin, and an almost total inability to suggest practical ways of bringing effective Western influence to bear on a solution….

Today 77 per cent of the country’s population is Ukrainian. But 17 per cent is Russian, a third of the population speak Russian and many of these people have strong family ties with Russia. Only the Ukrainians from Galicia look unequivocally to the West.

Meanwhile, most Russians feel strong emotional links to Ukraine as the cradle of their civilisation. Even the most open minded feel its loss like an amputated limb. …

… Putin arrived in 2000, ambitious to strengthen Russia’s influence with its neighbours. And the West began its ill-judged attempts to draw Ukraine into its orbit regardless of Russian sensitivities.

… The first is respectable but merely rhetorical: Ukraine is entitled to decide its future for itself, and Russia has no legitimate claim to a voice. The second is a piece of old-fashioned geopolitics: Russia can never again become an imperial threat if Ukraine is incorporated into Nato and the European Union. This part of the policy is impractical to the point of irresponsibility. It ignores four things. The members of Nato and the EU have lost their appetite for further enlargement. Most Ukrainians do not want their country to join Nato, though they would be happy to join the EU. A majority want to remain on good terms with Russia. Above all, the West does not have the instruments to impose its will. …

The alternative is for the West to talk to the Russians and to whoever can speak with authority for Ukraine. So far the Americans have been ineffective on the sidelines, the British seem to have given up doing foreign policy altogether, and only the Germans, the Poles and the French have shown any capacity for action.

An eventual deal would doubtless have to include verifiable agreement by the West as well as the Russians to abandon meddling in Ukrainian affairs, a credible assurance that Nato will not try to recruit Ukraine and arrangements for the both the Russians and the West to prop up Ukraine’s disastrous economy….

Further obligatory background reading is a piece for Chatham House by another distinguished former British diplomat, former British ambassador in Moscow, and current member of the Chilcot Iraq Inquiry, the Rt Hon Sir Roderic Lyne.

And, finally, a comment by yet another equally distinguished British diplomat and former ambassador to Moscow, Sir Bryan Cartledge:

The key point, I believe, which the media largely overlook, is that the revolution in the Ukraine is primarily a protest against domestic corruption and misrule, not a vote for the EU or against Russia. The EU issue provided the occasion but was not the cause. In converting an internal protest into an East-West issue, the EU is making a huge mistake — Putin, of course, has been bound to follow suit. And quite apart from all this, the last thing the EU needs now is responsibility for an almost bankrupt and almost failed state.

These three know whereof they speak. Our noisy and belligerent political leaders and their media cheer-leaders with their crude and counter-productive posturing would do well to listen to them.

[Full disclosure: both Bryan Cartledge and Roderic Lyne are friends and my former Diplomatic Service colleagues. All three of us served together many years ago in the British embassy in Moscow.]

Brian

[1] Postscript and correction: as Roland Smith has helpfully pointed out in his comment below, I should not have written that nearly a fifth of the Ukrainian population are Russian “citizens”: i should have written “ethnic Russians” or “Russian speakers”. Of course the Russian habit of issuing passports to Russian speakers in neighbouring countries and then claiming the right to intervene to protect their ‘citizens’ across the border tends to blur the distinction between ‘Russians’ living abroad who are citizens of Russia, and those who are not.

]]>http://www.barder.com/4126/feed39Action on a continuing scandal: thousands still *indefinitely* imprisoned “for public protection”http://www.barder.com/4119
http://www.barder.com/4119#commentsWed, 26 Feb 2014 22:54:37 +0000http://www.barder.com/?p=4119In 2012, nearly two years ago, parliament passed legislation abolishing the infamous system of Indeterminate Sentences for Public Protection (IPPs), introduced in 2005 by a Labour home secretary, David Blunkett, an indefensible move but obstinately defended by ministers for the rest of the life of the Blair and Brown governments. It fell to a small-l liberal Tory Justice secretary, Kenneth Clarke, to declare the system iniquitous and unjust, and to introduce the legislation that abolished it. Stubborn and illiberal to the end, the Labour opposition complained that abolition posed a threat to public security. So much for traditional Labour principles.

Alas! Abolition has not turned out to be the end of this shabby story. As Justice Secretary Clarke had recognised that the criteria for deciding whether IPP prisoners should be released after serving their ‘tariffs’ (the punishment element of their IPP sentences) were grossly tilted against the prisoners – and against basic principles of justice – by effectively requiring IPPs to prove to the parole board that if released they would not re-offend: an inherently impossible requirement. As a result, barely 4 to 5 percent of IPPs have been released under these Kafkaesque criteria. Clarke indicated publicly that he aimed to use the powers granted to him under the abolition law to change the release criteria so that an IPP prisoner should be released on completion of his tariff unless the parole board could show that there were specified grounds for believing that his release would pose a serious risk to public safety – thus reversing the onus of proof to where it belonged.

But before Clarke could follow through on IPP abolition by making this long overdue reform of the release criteria for IPPs still in prison, Clarke was sacked from his position at the Ministry of Justice and replaced by another Tory, this time a hard-line right-winger, Chris Grayling. Grayling, to his shame, has so far shown no interest in exercising his powers under the Act to reform, or even to improve, the release criteria. As a result thousands of IPPs languish in prison to this day, with very little hope of release in the foreseeable future, nearly two years after the present coalition government abolished IPPs.

All this has passed with little or no public concern or debate, until now. Next Tuesday, 4 March 2014, there is to be a public panel discussion, with very distinguished participants, on the subject “The Prisoners Left Behind: Imprisonment for Public Protection After Its Abolition“. The event is open to all and attendance is free. It is organised by the Bingham Centre for the Rule of Law together with Lord Lloyd of Berwick, the former Appeal Court judge, who is to be one of the panel members. The other speakers will be:

• More than 5,000 prisoners remain in indefinite detention under sentences of imprisonment imposed for public protection (IPP) between 2005 and 2012. More than half have exceeded their tariff and are waiting to come before the Parole Board.

• In the case of 773 prisoners the tariff was two years or less. But IPP was imposed because until 2008 the sentence was mandatory. 350 of these prisoners have exceeded their tariff by four years or more.

• Parliament abolished the IPP sentence in 2012. Ken Clarke, the Minister who introduced this amendment, said that IPPs were ‘unclear, inconsistent and have been used far more than was ever intended… That is unjust to the people in question and completely inconsistent with the policy of punishment, reform and rehabilitation’.

• In 2012 Parliament made specific provision for handling the backlog. The Justice Secretary [Chris Grayling] was given power to vary the release test. But he has so far declined to exercise that power, even though at the current rate of release it will be nine years before the backlog is cleared.

• In several cases the ECtHR [European Court of Human Rights] has found that the continued detention of IPP prisoners was arbitrary and in breach of their Convention rights . There are more [ECtHR] cases in the pipeline. [My emphasis – BLB]

It will be interesting to see whether, and if so how, the Justice Ministry participant in the discussion, Lord Faulks, contrives to defend and justify this scandalous and shameful state of affairs.

Important footnote

Thursday 13 March is to be a Day of Action against the continued detention of the thousands of IPPs still behind bars. That evening the BBC 2 television programme Newsnightis scheduling a segment on this issue. This should be well worth watching. I’m told that there are also plans for a public meeting of protest on Thursday 13 March about the continued imprisonment of IPPs, to hand in a letter to No. 10 Downing Street and then to move to the Houses of Parliament for meetings with Ministers, peers and MPs. Details of timing, etc., can be seen by Facebook members (and possibly others) at https://www.facebook.com/events/258296224335919/?ref_dashboard_filter=upcoming. The organisers are very welcome to supply details in comments at the end of this post of how to take part in these events: where and when to go and what to do beforehand in preparation. [Later: there are now several ‘comments’ on this post, below, with information and a warning about this ‘Day of Action’ on IPPs: please read them before you decide whether to turn up for any particular event.]

* * * * *

So at last enlightened opinion is beginning to wake up to what is going on, and to the evident failure of the Justice Secretary to do anything about it, even though the power to resolve the problem has been given to him by an Act of Parliament passed under the government of which he is a member. It’s surely time that Mr Chris Grayling is called to account for a failure which continues to bring such (mostly quite undeserved and wholly unnecessary) misery and fear to so many thousands of people. Keeping thousands of citizens in prison not as punishment for what they have done but out of fear of what they might conceivably do in the future is the mark of a barbarous society which has lost its moral bearings and forgotten the most elementary principles of justice. Enough!

Brian

]]>http://www.barder.com/4119/feed25“Soft power” is nothing more than influencehttp://www.barder.com/4112
http://www.barder.com/4112#commentsSun, 19 Jan 2014 09:44:24 +0000http://www.barder.com/?p=4112In recent years no scholarly article about diplomacy or report on the subject in the toffs’ press has been complete without a knowing reference to “soft power” – the deployment of cultural and other peaceful assets as means of persuasion. It is often contrasted with “hard power”, persuasion by use of bombs, drones, Special Forces, blackmail, threats, and the like. Now the term soft power has been comprehensively discredited by the person best qualified to torpedo it, Emeritus Professor G R Berridge, the guru of diplomatic studies and author of their classic text, Diplomacy: Theory and Practice, among many other books and articles. In a few witty and pithy paragraphs on the home page of his website, Professor Berridge expertly deconstructs the definition of “soft power” rashly recorded by its inventor, the distinguished American scholar “Joseph S. Nye, Jnr., a Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor and former senior member of the US military-intelligence complex”. Berridge castigates Nye’s definition as “cluttered with redundant words”, and for describing “something for which we have long had a more elegant term: influence. Removing the clutter makes this obvious.” He thereupon surgically excises the clutter, exposing what remains as nothing more than a perfectly satisfactory definition of “influence”.

Berridge offers three possible reasons for the virus-like spread of this “silly and inelegant synonym for influence”: first, that it’s easy to grasp, whereas ‘influence’ is hard to define even though not hard to understand; secondly, because of “the influence, sorry, soft power, of the leading American universities, the US International Relations establishment … and major American publishers, reinforced by the pull of the English language”; and thirdly because the enthusiasts for soft power (and for its originator) have yielded to the temptation to describe it as a concept, rather than simply a term, “thereby suggesting the discovery of something new”, even though Nye himself is on record as admitting that “the behaviour it denotes is as old as human history”.

Practising diplomats, especially typically pragmatic British practitioners, as distinct from academic teachers and students of the theory and history of diplomacy, are sometimes bewildered by theoretical expositions of what they are supposed to be up to and why they are up to it. Here is a refreshing example of the reverse: a leading academic demonstrates that the soft power emperor is sartorially challenged, that calling influence “soft power” adds precisely nothing to our understanding of it, and that the exercise of non-coercive influence has been one of the principal features of diplomacy, among several others, since the first human tried to persuade the second human to have a bite of the first apple. Diplomats need no longer feel uneasy about their activities being defined as the deployment of soft power, when what they do is largely simple common sense. Influence is the diplomat’s primary tool, almost always preferable to the use or threat of force as a means of getting others to behave in the way you want them to. Calling it soft power is neither here nor there.

(Full disclosure: Geoff Berridge is an old friend. I was privileged to be invited to read an early draft of his short essay on soft power and to encourage him to publish it on his website. If his piece succeeds in killing off this superfluous and pretentious term, I shall have to plead guilty as a minor but enthusiastic accessory to the assassination.)

Brian

]]>http://www.barder.com/4112/feed7Self-governing Scotland in a federal UK: Linda Colley on the historical contexthttp://www.barder.com/4106
http://www.barder.com/4106#commentsMon, 06 Jan 2014 11:59:57 +0000http://www.barder.com/?p=4106This is a post-script to my previous post (http://www.barder.com/4101), “Denying the Scots the option most of them legitimately want puts our country’s future in danger“. The eminent historian and commentator Professor Linda Colley has just published an important book, “Acts of Union and Disunion“, telling the story of changes in the relationships between the constituent nations of the present United Kingdom over the centuries, including the various proposals at different times for a formal federation of the four nations. These have been supported in one form or another by such powerful former leaders as Churchill and Lloyd George. It is legitimate to ask why none of our present political leaders apparently has the imagination or courage to espouse such a radical cause.

One of our most distinguished historians, Linda Colley is Shelby M.C.Davis 1958 Professor of History at Princeton and a Fellow of the British Academy. She has previously taught at Cambridge, Yale and LSE. Her earlier books include Wolfson Prize-winning Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837; Captives: Britain, Empire and the World, 1600-1850 and The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History.

Her new book is based on a series of talks on BBC Radio 4, starting today (6 January 2014) at 13:45 and continuing for the next two weeks.

The relevance of Professor Colley’s books and talks to the issues arising from next September’s referendum on independence for Scotland is amply demonstrated by the following extract from her fascinating article in today’s Guardian:

One of the notable features of present-day debates on possible Scottish independence has been the lack of imagination and creativity thus far displayed by most of those seeking to make the unionist case. The assumption appears to be that appeals to economic individualism and fostered fears of the unknown will by themselves be sufficient to make Scots hesitate about opting for independence. This strategy may or may not prove effective, but it shortchanges the public, and not just in Scotland. Scots are being offered arguments in support of independence, and warnings against it. Neither they, nor anyone else in the UK, are being provided with alternative visions of what an amended, re-imagined union might conceivably be like, or what it might be for.

This is very different from the quality of debate out of which the Government of Ireland Act of 1914 emerged. The late 19th century saw all sorts of federal solutions being proposed for the UK’s many fault lines, sometimes at a high level.

Amen to that! It’s tempting to wonder whether the professor has been reading my latest blog post on the subject and its many predecessors, all making exactly the same point about “the lack of imagination and creativity thus far displayed by most of those seeking to make the unionist case“, were it not for the fact that Linda Colley has been deploying the same arguments in her books and other writings for many years, and basing them on her encyclopaedic knowledge of the history of constitutional relations between the constituent parts of the British Isles – a knowledge not, alas, shared by the present blogger. I shall try to remedy at least a part of my regrettable ignorance of that history by ordering and reading “Acts of Union and Disunion“, and by recording and listening to Professor Colley’s Radio 4 talks, starting this afternoon. I urge readers of this blog post to do the same.

Brian

]]>http://www.barder.com/4106/feed1Denying the Scots the option most of them legitimately want puts our country’s future in dangerhttp://www.barder.com/4101
http://www.barder.com/4101#commentsFri, 03 Jan 2014 17:23:04 +0000http://www.barder.com/?p=4101An article in the Financial Times byJanan Ganesh on Christmas eve, 2013, identified three main challenges to David Cameron during 2014: the European parliament elections, in which the right-wing, anti-EU party UKIP is widely expected (not necessarily rightly) to come top, ahead of Labour and the Tories; the coming round of bankers’ bonuses, popularly regarded as unacceptable, and for which the government is likely to be blamed; and the widespread (but wholly unfounded) fear of Bulgarian and Romanian immigrants ‘flooding’ into the country, ‘stealing jobs from British workers and driving down their wages’, now that the ban on their unrestricted right to come here has been lifted, something that will also be blamed on the government in the unlikely event that it happens.

This forecast seemed to me to omit a fourth looming challenge, potentially even more damaging — to Britain as well as to Mr Cameron — than the three listed by Mr Ganesh. The FT published the following letter from me on 2 January 2014:

Financial Times, letters, January 2, 2014

An even bigger menace for Cameron in 2014

From Sir Brian Barder.

Sir, Janan Ganesh, in an otherwise characteristically perceptive article (“Labour’s agonies will prove hazardous for Cameron”, December 24) identifies May’s European parliament elections as “the most menacing event the government faces next year”, but he overlooks an equally hazardous prospect: the referendum on Scottish independence in September. Although current polling suggests a probable vote against independence, the negligent failure of the UK government to offer the Scots a constructive alternative to independence other than the status quo, with which very many Scots are clearly dissatisfied, risks a steady shift of opinion in Scotland in the next nine months that could easily result in a vote spelling the early disintegration of the UK.

There is no respectable reason not to offer what a majority of Scots obviously want, namely full internal self-government within an already semi-federal UK (admittedly implying eventual changes, long overdue, for non-self-governing England). The Liberal Democrats have hinted at support for such a policy but both Labour and the Conservatives seem too timid to risk even gingerly touching the nettle, still less grasping it. If the UK falls apart on David Cameron’s watch, he will surely pay a higher electoral price in 2015 for his delinquency than Ed Miliband, and that must represent a menace to the Tories at least as great as the European parliament elections, bankers’ bonuses or unfounded fear of Bulgarian and Romanian immigrants.

Brian Barder, HM Diplomatic Service (Rtd), London SW18, UK

The referendum to decide for or against Scottish independence is to take place on Thursday, 18 September, in less than nine months’ time. If the Scots vote to break up the UK and go their own way, the lion’s share of the blame should fall on the government at Westminster, headed by Mr Cameron, for his failure to provide Scotland with an alternative to both independence and the status quo, neither of which is wanted by most Scots (as argued in my FT letter), simply because the government of the day, which alone can act as well as talk, bears the primary responsibility for that failure to act in time to avert the disintegration of our country.

But an almost equal burden of responsibility rests on the shoulders of Ed Miliband and the Labour party as the only party of the two with a significant presence in all three of Scotland, England and Wales. If the three main unionist parties can’t agree on a promise of full internal self-government for Scotland in the event that the Scots reject the independence option, there’s no reason why Mr Miliband should not commit himself and his party to that promise, to be honoured if and when there’s another Labour, or Labour-led, government. Such a policy might well meet stiff opposition from the Scottish Labour party, with its visceral hatred of the SNP in general and The Two Fishes, Salmond and Sturgeon, in particular. But the stakes are too high to allow Scottish Labour to stand in the way of what may well be a necessary condition for the survival of the UK as a single sovereign country – especially when an offer of full internal self-government within an eventually fully federal UK is strongly desirable in its own right, and not just as a short-term gimmick to head off the independistas.

The temptation for Mr Miliband and his colleagues to do nothing, and hope for the best on 18 September, is clearly very strong. But on the lowest level of electoral prospects alone, the consequences for the UK Labour party if Scotland secedes will be very serious. It’s not true, as often asserted, that without its safe Scottish seats Labour would never again be able to form a government in the rest of the UK: Labour would be better placed than the Tories to take a lead in forging a new constitutional future for England in a new union with Wales and Northern Ireland, but it would require a huge effort to transform itself into a primarily English party.

Meanwhile doing nothing, which seems to be the posture of both the Labour and the Conservative parties, is just as much a policy option, with predictable potential consequences, as adopting the one brave and radical policy which stands a fighting chance of satisfying the legitimate ambitions of a majority of Scottish people, and which might thereby save the United Kingdom for our children and our children’s children. Over to you, Mr Miliband. Mr Cameron lacks the authority, imagination and courage to do what needs to be done. That leaves you.

Brian

]]>http://www.barder.com/4101/feed8Don’t miss this brilliant filmhttp://www.barder.com/4095
http://www.barder.com/4095#commentsThu, 19 Dec 2013 12:43:32 +0000http://www.barder.com/?p=4095I’m still recovering from a blow to my emotional solar plexus delivered by a new movie, Blue Is the Warmest Colour (2013) by the French-Tunisian director Abdellatif Kechiche (born in Tunis, moved with his parents to Nice at the age of six).

Almost everyone knows two things about this film, one of them significant, the other not: that the film and both its leading actresses[1] won the highest award at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival, the Palme d’Or (a prima facie indication of its quality): and that it depicts a Lesbian love affair which includes lengthy and startlingly detailed sex scenes enacted by the two leading ladies (not particularly significant, because the sex is essential and integral to the story, and the fact that it depicts sex between two women is almost, but not entirely, coincidental – the story would not be radically changed if it concerned a love affair between a man and a woman, or even between two men). It is emphatically not pornographic; the sex scenes are beautiful and erotic but not titillating. In contrast with the rest of the film, the sex is more stylised than realistic. Some critics have argued that this small but noticeable stylistic difference between the sex scenes and the remainder of the film shows that the sex is superfluous, interpolated for box office purposes. I don’t think anyone who watches all three hours of this film (yes, it’s long) at all attentively could agree, but that’s necessarily a subjective judgement.

There’s one other departure from realism in the film as a whole: both the leading actresses, one or both of whom are on screen for almost the entire film, are strikingly attractive, with and without their clothes: real head-turners both. They can perhaps be forgiven their good looks since both are consummate actresses, the intense emotional realism of their performances allegedly enhanced by obsessiveness, verging on bullying, on the part of the director during shooting. The two women are Léa Seydoux (Emma), playing the older and more sexually experienced of the two, and Adèle Exarchopoulos (Adèle), French with a Greek grandfather, playing the younger character, a convincing 17 years old at the beginning of the saga. The start, development and climax of their affair are portrayed with exceptional tenderness; its effective termination is almost too violently terrible to watch, although life goes on beyond that point, if on a lower emotional level. The temptation to resort to melodrama is resolutely resisted. The ending is sad but wholly true to life.

An incidental charm is the location of the film in Lille, with many effective street scenes, one in the Grand’ Place, and another memorable sequence in the glorious swimming-pool art gallery, La Piscine Museum, at Roubaix, just outside Lille.

In addition to the Palme d’Or for the film and the two actresses at Cannes, the FIPRESCI Prize went to the director, Abdellatif Kechiche. The film has won a raft of other international prizes, awards and nominations: it will be astonishing if more are not on the way.

Only time will tell whether Blue Is the Warmest Colour deserves to be rated a great film. Whether or not it’s great, it’s certainly exceptional, and packs a tremendous punch. Don’t miss it.

Brian

[1] Enlightened modern usage is to describe actors of both genders as actors, and to shun the word actress as implicitly sexist. I have consciously disobeyed that rule in this post, because to describe the two leading players as actors looks hopelessly odd, when the fact of their femininity is such an important ingredient in the story, despite not being (in my perhaps eccentric view) absolutely central to it.

]]>http://www.barder.com/4095/feed0Give Scotland the option of what most Scots want — full self-government within the UKhttp://www.barder.com/4088
http://www.barder.com/4088#commentsThu, 28 Nov 2013 11:43:27 +0000http://www.barder.com/?p=4088In the Scottish independence referendum in less than a year’s time, on 18 September 2014, Scots will have to choose between two alternatives, neither of which the majority of Scots seem to want: (1) separation from the UK on terms that will become clear only after the referendum, or (2) the status quo, which means limited devolution as defined by the Scotland Act, 2012, and thus only limited control over their own affairs. It doesn’t have to be like this. The unionist parties, Labour, the Conservatives and the LibDems (especially the Labour party which alone has a significant presence in England, Scotland and Wales) have an obvious duty to offer Scotland an alternative to independence and secession from the UK which represents an improvement on the status quo and which corresponds to what, according to the polls, most Scottish people want – much more control over their own affairs. It’s a sad betrayal of the campaign to save the United Kingdom from disintegration that none of the unionist parties (with the honourable exception of the LibDems) has had the courage or vision to commit itself to such an offer in time to influence the outcome of the referendum.

The Guardian of 28 November 2013 publishes the following letter from me (I have re-inserted in the text below a couple of minor things unhelpfully edited out by the Guardian in the published version):

Simon Jenkins (Don’t lecture Scots. They want freedom, not wealth, 27 November) is clearly right to advocate an offer to Scotland of a status somewhere between full independence (which would be a tragedy for the whole UK) and the current degree of devolution. The polls suggest that a clear majority of Scots at present want neither independence nor the status quo, but much greater control of their own affairs within the UK. The continuing failure of the Labour and Conservative parties to promise Scotland full internal self-government (perhaps modelled on that enjoyed by, e.g., Massachusetts and New South Wales within their federations) as an attractive alternative to independence is both incomprehensible and unforgivable. There’s still time, but not much.

The failure of the No campaign, headed by the generally admirable Alistair Darling, to come up with an offer of full internal self-government for Scotland if the Scots reject the option of independence is probably attributable to two factors, neither of which is valid: first, the difficulty or impossibility of reaching agreement between Labour and the Conservatives on how much additional devolution should be offered to Scotland if the Scots reject independence, and secondly, the fear that if Scotland is offered what ought to amount to full internal self-government, this will intensify resentment in England of England’s complete lack of any self-government at all, and demands for the same full internal self-government for England as that to be offered to Scotland.

The first of these objections won’t wash: there’s nothing to stop Labour from promising full internal self-government for Scotland under the next Labour government, whether the Tories agree with it or not (and it would be difficult for the Tories to devise a convincing or reputable argument against it). The second objection is actually an argument in favour: if an offer of full internal self-government for Scotland reinforces the already growing demand for the same status for England, so much the better. The eventual achievement, over several years, of full internal self-government by Scotland, England, Wales and Northern Ireland would bring forward the happy day when the UK becomes a fully-fledged federation, the logical and inevitable culmination of the devolution process and the sole serious answer to the West Lothian Question.

Brian

]]>http://www.barder.com/4088/feed27Parliamentary inquisitions: either too soft or too harshhttp://www.barder.com/4082
http://www.barder.com/4082#commentsMon, 11 Nov 2013 17:42:19 +0000http://www.barder.com/?p=4082It’s depressing that parliamentary committees responsible for holding to account such powerful institutions and individuals as the intelligence and security services, the bankers and the police are often either far too soft or far too aggressive. Some inspire little confidence in their efficacy as watchdogs to ensure that the intelligence and security agencies respect our civil liberties as well as working to protect us. Others appear to be constrained by no procedural rules governing their powers and objectives, nor by any safeguards to protect those summoned to appear before them to be aggressively interrogated.

Did you watch ‘M’, ‘C’ and the man from GCHQ (he must resent not having a single-letter nom de guerre!) yesterday? I thought it was embarrassingly supine questioning. And if the MI6 man presents his intelligence material [to ministers and officials] with the same hyperbole as he does when he gives evidence, it must be very difficult to distinguish reality from imagination.

I very much agree. The committee was deeply unimpressive — conveying the impression, anyway to congenital sceptics, of being in a too-cosy relationship with the official eavesdroppers, sleuths and burglars, too respectful of them to say the softest boo to an elderly goose. Michael White in the following day’s Guardian was spot on when he said that the three top honchos seemed to have summoned the ISC to meet them, not vice versa. Obviously in an ideal world we should judge people by what they do and say, not by their physical appearance or even by the impression they convey on our television screens. But what these three powerful officials do and say is almost entirely secret: we have no basis for judging them apart from how they strike us on their rare public appearances. Did the three men seem roughly like ordinary sensible people, sharing ordinary citizens’ instincts and concerns (and sense of humour)? Did they show evidence of understanding the importance of balancing the demands of national security against the pressing need to protect our fundamental right to freedom from disproportionate state intrusion into our private lives? Or did they seem dogmatically committed to the principle that security by definition trumps civil liberties whenever and wherever the two collide? For those who watched the whole hearing last Thursday, those questions answer themselves.

The claim that these people are better equipped than the editors of the Guardian and the New York Times to judge (after extensive consultations and redactions) which bits of the various whistle-blowers’ leaked materials can safely be published seems plainly untenable; indeed laughable.

At the ISC hearing none of them was asked, or explained, why their “opponents” (those who threaten our security) were so pleased by the revelation that in order to identify the odd terrorist needle in their gigantic haystack, the intelligence services were obliged to collect such mindless quantities of hay in the form of all your and my emails and telephone calls and other private records, including access to their content. None of the three was asked or explained why we should consent to trust them not to read our emails and records or transcripts of our phone calls, so long as we hadn’t been communicating with the enemy — a kind of variant of William Hague’s deeply objectionable “If you’ve done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear” riff. None was asked or explained whether the security services were evading bans on eavesdropping on their own nationals by swapping data on other nationals, such as Americans, with sister services, such as the NSA, the US equivalent of our GCHQ. None was asked or confirmed whether our calendars, address books, or medical and bank records are being collected along with our emails and telephone transcripts. None was asked or explained how we can be confident that the scale of the surveillance they conduct is not just convenient and helpful to them but also (in the words of Human Rights Watch) “necessary, proportionate, and subject to adequate safeguards against abuse”. None was even asked to comment on the cause of the immense leaks that have occurred in recent months — namely the American practice of giving access to colossal quantities of highly classified material to literally hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians, including contractors not even in the public service, without a thought for the basic principle of the “need to know”. None was asked or volunteered to acknowledge that these leaks had revealed deeply disturbing and gaping holes in the whole system, that the scale of surveillance had got out of hand, and that drastic remedial action was self-evidently and urgently required.

It’s true that if I were a terrorist (which I assure you I’m not), I would be rather reassured to discover that in order to identify a dodgy email I had sent or an indiscreet telephone call I had made, the lads and lasses at Cheltenham would have to sift through billions upon billions of communications that they had inexplicably lumbered themselves with, of which 99.99% would be by definition utterly useless to them (although around 50% might come in handy one day to an aspiring blackmailer, I suppose). Perhaps that’s why the head of the secret intelligence service was so outraged by the Snowden revelations and so sure that al-Qaeda would be “rubbing their hands with glee”.

The salient point that should have emerged from the ISC hearing, but didn’t, is surely this. It is utterly unacceptable that any state organ — or any other institution, come to that — should be allowed secretly to collect and store and be able to read the contents of the personal electronic communications of entire national populations. Knowledge is power, and no conceivable institution should be allowed to possess and potentially to exercise such overwhelming power over a whole population and more. Sooner or later, if this industrial-scale intrusion is permitted to continue, that colossal power will be abused, and by then it will be too late to stop it. As far as I could tell, watching the proceedings live, not one of the three witnesses at the ISC hearing, and none of the committee’s members, showed the slightest sign of awareness of that monstrous problem with which the latest revelations confront us. That is seriously frightening.

Oversight of these power-hungry characters’ activities by a parliamentary committee manifestly unwilling to ask hard questions is clearly of questionable value. Even allowing for the constraints imposed by holding the hearing in public and on television, it’s very difficult to imagine any of the ISC members, hand-picked by the prime minister, seriously challenging the spooks even in their closed and secret sessions. A senior judge also has investigatory and supervisory powers over the three security and intelligence agencies but he or she reports in secret to the prime minister, so we aren’t allowed to know what malpractices the judge may have unearthed and what, if anything, the prime minister is doing about them. I don’t know how else these largely unaccountable officials can be brought under control, and restrained from stealing and storing everything just because they can, at mind-blowing public expense. Any independent invigilator, even a suitably sceptical judge, is liable to be immediately co-opted into the cosy magic circle of those who are, or who are encouraged to believe they are, in the know. The security services charm, intimidate and control those tasked with supervising them by sharing a careful selection of their secrets with them, thus in effect gagging them as well as flattering them. Somehow, though, these scandalous practices have got to be stopped, or we can say goodbye to some of our most fundamental liberties. Remember the Stasi!

The basic jobs of the security service, the secret intelligence service and GCHQ are unquestionably vital and indispensable. There’s no serious doubt that a huge majority of those who work in them are honest and committed, and often brave. Much (but not all) of what they do obviously has to be kept secret. But it is now clear that secrecy has come to mask abuse of power on a vast scale. The Americans and other democracies are taking this seriously and debating possible remedies. President Obama is trying to overcome NSA resistance to his plan to rein in their ability to harvest Americans’ data without any constraint. Other democracies are overhauling their oversight systems. It’s time we in Britain did the same, instead of furiously denouncing Mr Snowden and threatening the Guardian for telling us what we were entitled to know all along.

* * * * *

At the other end of the scale, power is being abused in a different way. We need to pay more attention to the growing habit of chairs (and some members) of certain parliamentary select committees — you know the ones I mean — of bullying and humiliating those summoned to appear before them as if conducting the Grand Inquisition, giving their defendants absolutely none of the protections and safeguards, such as the right to be legally represented, demanded by due process and the rule of law – in a word, by justice. At some of these hearings there are apparently no rules of admissible or inadmissible evidence, no Fifth Amendment right to refuse to answer if the answer might tend to incriminate the accused, no protection from an impartial presiding judge or defence counsel against bullying by the prosecution, no right to receive, before the hearing, full details of the prosecution’s case. The Grand Inquisitor is judge, jury and prosecutor rolled into one: the defendant is on his own.

A hearing like this is not just an aggressive probing interview of the kind we watch on the BBC Newsnight programme or hear on the BBC Today programme. It is much more like a kangaroo court mated with a show trial, and on national television into the bargain: wonderful entertainment, but at a shocking price Lawyers respect the principle of Equality of Arms in a proper trial, but in these virtual trials by parliamentary committee there’s no such thing. Justice is not served by such one-sided proceedings and it’s deeply distasteful, however unsavoury some of the victims might be.

Some of our MPs are beginning to act like pit bull terriers and rottweilers. Others behave like neutered pussy-cats. There really needs to be a middle way.

Brian

Grateful acknowledgements to the Huffington Post for the (slightly doctored) picture, which bears no resemblance to any real persons living or dead.

]]>http://www.barder.com/4082/feed8Notes on October 2013http://www.barder.com/4069
http://www.barder.com/4069#commentsSun, 20 Oct 2013 11:48:18 +0000http://www.barder.com/?p=4069The savage rise in household energy prices must be a worry for almost everyone in Britain, apart from the super-rich. Ed Miliband has clearly scored a popular bull’s-eye with his promise to freeze them (the prices, not the Britons, although…) if and when Labour comes back into office, and to use the moratorium to reform the dysfunctional market in gas and electricity. But I don’t understand why he hasn’t also promised to end the indefensible system whereby the cost of developing green, renewable energy sources to replace carbons is funded by a flat-rate addition to all energy bills, which is part of the reason for energy being so expensive. I know there’s supposed to be a vital principle that “the polluter pays”, but since ordinary users of gas and electricity have almost no choice of energy source, the imposition of what is effectively a tax on fuel bills which falls most heavily on the poorest seems iniquitous. Transferring to renewables is clearly a social good which should be funded out of progressive general taxation, with the richest paying the most and the poorest nothing. That would bring down energy bills quickly, as well as being much fairer. Labour should promise to end this impost before the Tories (or their junior partners) think of it.

* * * * *

Talking of rising energy prices, I was amused to hear the energy minister (whose name escapes me) claiming to “wear a jumper in the house” to reduce his central heating bill. Not only did this seem a wonderful example of the “let them eat cake” school of public relations: it also jarred on those of us who refer to the garment in question, when worn by a man, as a sweater, not a jumper. Perhaps the minister was brought up in a home full of women.

* * * * *

Fresh developments in the “Plebgate” saga continue to unfold before our wondering eyes. Andrew Mitchell, accused by the cops more than a year ago of repeatedly swearing at the policepersons (f. as well as m.) on duty in Downing Street and calling them ‘plebs’ when they wouldn’t let him cycle through the main gates, much later had a meeting in his constituency office with three senior policemen which had been billed as ‘private’. As soon as the meeting ended, the three coppers came out and told the press that Mitchell had refused to give them his own account of what had happened and what, according to him, he had really said. For this alleged failure they said he should resign from his government post (as he was subsequently forced to do). Fortunately Mitchell had had the foresight clandestinely to record the whole meeting, the transcript of which showed that the coppers’ accusation was completely false.

We should add to this the discovery by Channel Four News that the email to another Tory MP from someone purporting to be an ordinary member of the public who claimed to have heard Mitchell utter the fatal p-word and several f-words from outside the gates, turned out to be from a serving policeman who had been nowhere near Downing Street on the day in question: and the evidence of the CCTV cameras that Mitchell’s verbal exchange with the police had lasted only a few seconds, almost certainly too short a time for delivery of the extended tirade reported by the police. There’s more: the police report had alleged that Mitchell’s outburst had visibly shocked several passers-by in Whitehall who had overheard it, whereas the same CCTV cameras showed clearly that Whitehall had been completely deserted at the time, apart from one pedestrian who didn’t even pause or look round as he walked past. Questions began to be asked about the doubtful propriety of giving the Sun newspaper the police’s account of what had happened, and shortly afterwards actually copying the confidential official police log of the episode to the Daily Telegraph. The whole police case begins to look distinctly moth-eaten. No wonder the investigation into what really took place in Downing Street on that night of 19 September 2012, more than a year ago, is still not ready to report while the Director of Public Prosecutions scrutinises the evidence to see whether there’s a case for anyone to be prosecuted.

No-one wins friends by saying “I told you so.” But on 24 September, 2012, just five days after the altercation in Downing Street, and several weeks before the police case began to unravel, I wrote a post on this blog expressing scepticism about the proposition that a man with Mitchell’s background and education would ever use the kind of language attributed to him by the Downing Street police. “Indeed,” I wrote then,

the whole script given (or sold?) to the Sun newspaper (presumably by the police or someone acting for them) reads very strangely, looking much more like a police approximation in imagined toff-ese than what a toff is actually likely to have said. Clearly he swore, doesn’t deny it, and has apologised for it; and anyway ‘pleb’ is hardly the most insulting word in the language, especially as it so obviously says more about the speaker than the person spoken to.

Luckily my apparent prescience is on the record at http://www.barder.com/3739. Not many people were questioning the police account at that early stage. Now not many believe a word of it – least of all the p-word.

* * * * *

Another (this time minor) mystery about ‘Plebgate': why does the commentariat continue to talk about Andrew Mitchell having lost his “Cabinet post” as a result of the dispute? Mitchell had been a member of the Cabinet earlier, as International Development Secretary; but at the time of his tiff with the Downing Street police, as Government Chief Whip, he wasn’t. It seems that not many people know that.

* * * * *

My main excuse for neglecting this blog for so long is that I’ve been busy writing a book – my first, and pretty certainly my last. It’s a funny time to be writing one’s first book in one’s 80th year and I am finding that the actual writing of the book is the least arduous part of the exercise: managing relations with the publisher and the editor in charge of getting the thing published, persuading experts in the field to read your manuscript and warn you of errors – and with luck to provide you with a glowing comment for use as blurb and for marketing purposes, wrestling with the unintelligible forms devised by the US tax authorities to be filled in (or out) to enable them to tax any royalties arising from American book sales, getting advice on which expenses can be set against UK tax on UK royalties, preparing to write the Acknowledgements and compile an index when the page proofs arrive, negotiating the contract with the publishers and trying to persuade them to let you have a few more free copies for distribution to family and friends – all this takes up more time, and sets more booby-traps, than writing the book in the first place.

Fortunately my publishers’ editor is a delightful, patient and unerringly helpful lady, and comments from experts who have read the manuscript (if 15 Word files can be called a manuscript) have been uniformly constructive and positive. In case you’re interested, the book is definitely not a memoir or autobiography, diplomatic or otherwise, nor is it a novel or other work of fiction, although it has superficial elements of both. I shall be reporting progress from time to time on this blog and I may put extracts from it on my website in due course: watch this space! In the meantime, there’s already a lot of information about it on my publishers’ website, at https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781442226357 (click all four tabs there, “Description”, “Author[s]”, “Table of Contents” and especially “Reviews“). That web page still shows the publication date as next July, but in fact the scheduled publication date has been brought forward to the spring of next year, since I transmitted the finished product to the publishers earlier than they had expected. Start saving up for a copy now! End of commercial.

Brian

]]>http://www.barder.com/4069/feed3Syria: the US and Russia (remember Kosovo?)http://www.barder.com/4056
http://www.barder.com/4056#commentsSat, 14 Sep 2013 14:25:21 +0000http://www.barder.com/?p=4056For a fascinating account of the events leading up to this morning’s US-Russian framework agreement on Syrian chemical weapons disarmament, please see the excellent fact-based article in today’s Financial Times (14/15 September) by James Blitz and others: the FT makes it difficult to quote a URL but if you click on this: A long week: Putin’s diplomatic gambit and then exit from the invitation to sign up for some kind of subscription to the FT, you should get the article (but nb: the heading given to the article gets it perversely wrong). It shows that only four hours elapsed between what some commentators obstinately continue to call Kerry’s ‘off-the-cuff gaffe’, suggesting that Assad could avert a military strike by turning over his chemical weapons to international control, and Lavrov’s public embrace of that proposal. It’s obvious, to me anyway, that Russia could not have announced its support for this idea without having forcefully pressured Assad into submitting to it first; and even the Russians would have needed more than four hours to do that. In fact the idea seems to have had its genesis in US-Russian off-piste exchanges at the G20 summit in Mexico in June 2012, and to have been firmed up between Obama and Putin in St Petersburg at the G20 this year, on 5 and 6 September. I think even Blitz’s article probably underestimates the amount of detailed work on it that both sides would have done during that time, before Russia discreetly gave the green light to Washingtom: “Mission accomplished: we have squared Assad: go ahead and make the proposal, as casually as you like, and we’ll grab it, as agreed.” (I’m guessing, of course, but….) Did the Americans insist that the proposal must appear to have come from them in the first place, and not from the Russians? Perhaps it did, anyway.

I even wonder whether Obama’s otherwise strange decision to seek Congressional approval for a strike against Syria might have been designed to buy just enough extra time for the Russians to complete the softening up of Assad so that the agreed joint exercise could go ahead. Perhaps he’s had a strategy all along after all. He’s unlikely simply to have been copying Cameron, especially when Cameron’s ploy in the British parliament had turned into such a disaster — for Cameron, anyway, if not for peace.

So unless it all goes horribly wrong (and I doubt if either Putin or Obama can allow it to do that), we have a near repetition of the events of 1999 when Blair was cheer-leading NATO to bomb the hell out of Yugoslavia to bring the Serbs to heel, and getting nowhere: a shrewder US President (Clinton) eventually realised that only Russia had the necessary hold over Milosevic and that accordingly the west would have to give up trying to exclude Russia from the exercise. Clinton accordingly told Yeltsin that Russian participation was indispensable (as confirmed in Clinton’s memoirs), and sent a joint US-Russian-Finnish delegation to Milisovic to present completely new settlement proposals and to tell him that the game was up. Result: a largely peaceful negotiated settlement under UN auspices; end, and utter failure, of NATO bombing.

The great difference with Syria 2013 is that Obama was quicker than Clinton to realise that the key to success was to work with, not against, the Russians, thus opening up the possibility of a peaceful settlement approved by the UN before, not after, the air bombardment had begun. And it was heartening to hear Kerry and Lavrov at their press conference this morning (14 Sept.) expressing the hope that their collaboration over the international destruction of Syria’s chemical weapons might pave the way to continuing collaboration in the search for an eventual diplomatic and political solution to the overall Syrian conflict, not a military one.

Under pressure from a questioner, Kerry was forced to repeat the American myth that any US President has the right to order the use of military force to protect United States interests even if necessary without the approval of the UN (he was referring of course to the US Constitution, not the UN Charter or international law). But his emphasis throughout was on the need for diplomatic/political solutions, not military ones, and for all problems over compliance or delays to be referred, under the new agreement, to the United Nations Security Council for decisions on what to do about them, specifically under Chapter VII of the Charter. Apart from anything else, this development gives the lie to the parrot-cry of the Stupid Tendency: “If you’re opposed to the use of military force to deter further chemical weapon attacks, you’re saying we must stand idly by and do nothing.”

It’s just rather sad that in both cases the prime minister in office in Britain at the time – Blair then, Cameron now — was still rattling his rusty old sabre long after the Americans had seen the light and quietly organised a deal with the Russians to do the job peacefully. The Russians had legitimate interests in the Balkans, especially Serbia, then, and in the Mediterranean, especially Syria, now. Russian and western interests in stopping the use of chemical weapons in Syria and in an eventual settlement of the conflict broadly coincide, despite some important differences. There’s ample common ground to permit a fruitful collaboration in search of mutually agreed peaceful solutions, however difficult the Russians may often be as partners. We need to grow up and recognise that the cold war’s over. Let us hope that the Labour party leadership has learned the right lessons from these events, even if the Tories have not.